31–40 of 191 posts
This title made me wonder, what ever happened to monkey pox. Turns out that it has more or less died away.
Except it didn't, it fell off the news cycle before the peak in August and people just stopped talking about it. New cases are still happening: https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/index.h...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, most of the most-at-risk population has lived through the AIDS horror. A good gay friend of mine roughly summarized it as "we gays know how bad diseases can get, and fuck it my dating life even after 2 years of pandemic is not as important as is my life". Once it was clear that MSM were (once again) a high-risk group, they all went back to either reducing contacts or at least wearing condoms. In contras…
I started wearing a mask pretty early on. The first one was a fabric one my mother in law made as it was still at a time when PPE for healthcare workers was a bigger priority. I kept wearing a mask until the overwhelming majority of people around me had long given up. I believed it was the right thing to do regardless but I'm not sure I'm as optimistic as you regarding their effectiveness.
Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.
As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)
EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)
The headline is scary but #1 Ebola isn't airborne and #2 it's super deadly which means it kills before it really has a chance to spread widely.
I mean it could evolve to be airborne in the wild or in a research lab doing intentional gain of function research (a practice for which funding was temporarily halted by Obama) and hybridization much like has been done at BSL-4 facilities worldwide unchecked including by EcoHealth alliance with bat coronaviruses via US funding at the WIV prior to the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. https://www.science.org/content/article/n…
The outbreak in Uganda is troubling, but a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. No professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a few weeks because the trajectory of the outbreak changes in response to interventions and behaviors.
That sounds... wrong? What if the 6+ month forecast assuming no interventions is useful to compel an intervention, and the 2-3 week one is not?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was handled well by global public health authorities, with education campaigns, targeted vaccinations, early warning, treatment, and growing immunity in the most at-risk populations.
Additionally, most of the most-at-risk population has lived through the AIDS horror. A good gay friend of mine roughly summarized it as "we gays know how bad diseases can get, and fuck it my dating life even after 2 years of pandemic is not as important as is my life". Once it was clear that MSM were (once again) a high-risk group, they all went back to either reducing contacts or at least wearing condoms. In contras…
This title made me wonder, what ever happened to monkey pox. Turns out that it has more or less died away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it could evolve to be airborne in the wild or in a research lab doing intentional gain of function research (a practice for which funding was temporarily halted by Obama) and hybridization much like has been done at BSL-4 facilities worldwide unchecked including by EcoHealth alliance with bat coronaviruses via US funding at the WIV prior to the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. https://www.science.org/content/article/n…
Why is parent getting downvoted? The lab leak theory is pretty mainstream these days. And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.
Stricter control of GoF makes a lot of sense but the reason everyone was studying coronavirus pandemics in the first place is because we'd had several near misses and everyone in the virology community knew it was only a matter of time before the right circumstances allowed a spillover to do exactly what Covid19 did.
The outbreak in Uganda is troubling, but a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. No professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a few weeks because the trajectory of the outbreak changes in response to interventions and behaviors.
Sure is, which is why it's odd we've been bombarded with endless graphs with months of predictions, over the past 2.5 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m glad the community was able to find a solution, and luckily monkey pox was not inherently deadly, but they did not comply with some efforts to mitigate the disease, particularly contact tracing https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-all-but-give...
Contact tracing in the Covid context has worked horribly everywhere in the US, as far as I know, outside of more or less defined communities where penalties could attach. And even there is mostly failed when they didn't. Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort? Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m glad the community was able to find a solution, and luckily monkey pox was not inherently deadly, but they did not comply with some efforts to mitigate the disease, particularly contact tracing https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-all-but-give...
Contact tracing in the Covid context has worked horribly everywhere in the US, as far as I know, outside of more or less defined communities where penalties could attach. And even there is mostly failed when they didn't. Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort? Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not…
Well yeah, it’s hard to recall the dozens or hundreds of people you may have interacted with over the course of days or weeks. It is however much easier to contract trace sexual partners, unless of course you’re engaging in repeated anonymous sexual encounters...