CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation • Hacker News Board

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#101

Post by SkyMarshal » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #61

SkyMarshal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asia has been living in a masked world for at least two decades. It's not a major inconvenience, and it doesn't infringe on anyone's freedoms. Westerners really need to stop being such spoiled entitled children about this situation, and cowboy up and do what it takes to eradicate this pandemic.

Well, see, this is the kind of attitude that gets people concerned. I'm not aware of any expert or health official who believes that eradicating the pandemic is possible. If you've gotten the impression that our public health response is about reaching some future point where Covid-19 is gone and nobody ever has to worry about it, you're being misled.

> I'm not aware of any expert or health official who believes that eradicating the pandemic is possible.

There are plenty of experts and health officials who believe that eradicating the pandemic is possible. Including some with experience eradicating other pandemics like Ebola and Zika [1], along with the editor-in-chief of the Lancet [2], among others.

Eradicating a pandemic is not unprecedented, it can and has been done.

> If you've gotten the impression that our public health response is about reaching some future point where Covid-19 is gone and nobody ever has to worry about it, you're being misled.

Clearly our COVID19 response is not currently about that, or no one would have to advocate for it.

[1]:https://necsi.edu/corona-virus-pandemic. (Ebola: https://necsi.edu/ending-pandemics)

[2]:https://www.endcoronavirus.org/

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#102

Post by Exmoor » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

smaryjerry wrote: post #98

Delta is getting a crazy amount of press but for some reason most articles don’t show any of the articles stats. For instance rather than show cases or deaths, they show “percent of cases that are delta.” Here is the CDC chart showing cases and deaths by group. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti... Cases are increasing but even case increase is a tiny blip compared to winter. Cases have alwa…

> Cases are increasing but even case increase is a tiny blip compared to winter.

If you look at the US as a whole cases are not are still well below the worst daily averages of last Christmas, but blip is a much stronger word than I'd use when the trend line is pointed up with no obvious end in sight.

Drill down on the individual states with the most issues and you'll see that places like Louisiana are basically at the same point as they were in winter and will likely far exceed it.

As you say, the fact that most of the most vulnerable age ranges have been vaccinated will certainly help the death tolls. The flip side of that, however, is that a much higher concentration of the deaths in those states are going to be younger individuals.

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#103

Post by SkyMarshal » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

packetlost wrote: post #100

SkyMarshal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asia has been living in a masked world for at least two decades. It's not a major inconvenience, and it doesn't infringe on anyone's freedoms. Westerners really need to stop being such spoiled entitled children about this situation, and cowboy up and do what it takes to eradicate this pandemic.

This is definitely not true. People generally wear masks when they are sick, not all the time. There is a big difference.

And also during past pandemics like SARS, swine flu, others. Because Asian culture already accepts mask wearing when sick as a kind of civil courtesy and responsibility, it wasn’t a big step up for widespread mask wearing during pandemics.

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#104

Post by packetlost » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #93

carnitas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I don’t know, crushing depression, psychological atmosphere of fear, no biggy

The desire to get rid of masks is mostly iconoclastic in my opinion. People come up with all sorts of hand-wringing explanations for the anti-mask phenomenon but it's actually pretty simple in my opinion, people want rid of their masks for the same reason English people burn effigies of Guy Fawkes on the 5th of November. It's not the masks themselves that make people dislike them, it's what they represent. To some th…

I, for one, hate wearing masks. I do it if I'm required or am sick and not otherwise. In the winter glasses + hat + longer hair make it really difficult to get a mask on-off (not to mention extra fogging up glasses, which can be dangerous in some situations) and in the hot summers it quickly can cause overheating. It's also so depressing to not see people's faces outside of a small familial or maybe social bubble.

Not everything is politically motivated.

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#105

Post by packetlost » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

arpa wrote: post #33

seattle_spring wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what did you say? I can't see through these fogged glasses.

I feel you man, but that means the seal on your nose is leaking. Pushing down on the flexible strip for better seal usually helps.

It helps but it's near impossible to get it to stay that way

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#106

Post by packetlost » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #103

packetlost wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely not true. People generally wear masks when they are sick, not all the time. There is a big difference.

And also during past pandemics like SARS, swine flu, others. Because Asian culture already accepts mask wearing when sick as a kind of civil courtesy and responsibility, it wasn’t a big step up for widespread mask wearing during pandemics.

Mask wearing when you know you're sick is something I would like to see more in the West (one of the few good things that might come out of the pandemic). Regardless, I imagine there are negative psychological effects of long-term society-wide mask wearing. Just speaking for myself, I found it very depressing not being able to see people's faces outside of a small familiar and social bubble for a year and I honestly dread going back to it.

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#107

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #101

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, see, this is the kind of attitude that gets people concerned. I'm not aware of any expert or health official who believes that eradicating the pandemic is possible. If you've gotten the impression that our public health response is about reaching some future point where Covid-19 is gone and nobody ever has to worry about it, you're being misled.

> I'm not aware of any expert or health official who believes that eradicating the pandemic is possible. There are plenty of experts and health officials who believe that eradicating the pandemic is possible. Including some with experience eradicating other pandemics like Ebola and Zika [1], along with the editor-in-chief of the Lancet [2], among others. Eradicating a pandemic is not unprecedented, it can and has bee…

First off, I think this is an instructive case of reputation laundering. These seem like two independent sources at first, but if you dig deeper, both of these sites are mouthpieces for one Yaneer Bar-Yam.

I have to concede that he's not a crank, and appears to have meaningful pandemic expertise. I'm now aware of one expert who's confident eliminating Covid is possible. But this has to be evaluated in the context of the overwhelming consensus (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2) that it's probably not, and these sites are structured as grand calls to action more than detailed arguments, so it's hard for me to figure out what the content of the disagreement is. What does Bar-Yam know that immunologists don't?

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#108

Post by arpa » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #73

arpa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadness. Care to elaborate with a link perhaps?

https://www.facewatch.co.uk/2020/05/11/facewatch-launches-fa... https://www.sensory.com/finally-a-biometric-solution-that-re... https://qz.com/1803737/chinas-facial-recognition-tech-can-cr...

thank you, sincerely

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#109

Post by jpster » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

criticaltinker wrote: post #78

Wow these slides are packed with information and accompanying citations - truly a great resource for anyone following the literature regarding COVID-19 and especially the variants of concern. I need more time to digest this presentation, but there are two important topics that I feel are missing or at least underrepresented: 1) The effectiveness of early outpatient treatment using a combination of existing medicines…

> The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape"

So the CDC made a grave error in telling vaccinated people they could remove their masks.

Re: CDC Internal Delta Variant Presentation

#110

Post by lamontcg » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

arc-in-space wrote: post #81

lamontcg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cursed can we please stop using this stupid word? calling things "cursed" is the opposite of bringing any clarity to the world.

I disagree, I think its recent growth in use is a smooth addition to the language, even if we do already have plenty of synonyms for 'bad'. Speaking of those, your very classy 'stupid' hasn't exactly clarified much either.

It isn't just "bad", it denies knowledge of any cause and shrugs it off. If you're looking at broken tech and you shrug it off as "oh well its just cursed" then you're never going to solve the problem. The frequent posts on this site where someone drilled down through multiple levels and determined root causes of issues and mitigations were not written by someone who though the problem was "cursed". The use of that word implicitly turns the user's brain off from understanding any further. And I continually see it used more often. And there's always a reason. Literally nothing is "cursed". You can choose to not dig into the causes because time is finite, but using that kind of language makes the decision for you. And that's relevant to this site, if you want to solve those kinds of problems you need to not view things as being "cursed". Really that word is being used more and more in a way which is explicitly damaging to understanding. If you want to be more successful in your career in tech, you should really cut it out of your vocabulary since it is a self-defeating word.