COVID-19

[vnzla81]

Now I’m getting called a sheep by somebody I know for getting the vaccine lol

He talks about giving up my “freedom” but I’m the one traveling and going to concerts while he has to stay home because he doesn’t want to risk it

[Gamble1]

For those that are interested I wanted to explain how the vaccines and the waning antibody response and yet still have good protection from severe disease.

Protective immunity is much more than just antibody response to an infection or a vaccine. The B cells which make the antibodies eventually either die off or fall asleep. They fall asleep to keep from dying essentially but they need to be told to wake up again. This is why antibodies drop but will rebound quickly if you get infected. Keep in mind these cells that fall asleep can stay like that for over a decade.

The T cells also have memory but they are the ones that actively target infected cells. These guys are why some people are asymptomatic with an infection since they are like mob bosses to the viruses. People who do really poor with the virus basically do not have great T cells or not enough of them.

So as you here the immunity wanes in the media this really is talking about antibodies that prevent the virus from infecting you. I haven't seen any data really saying the most important cells lose the memory of the virus from the vaccines which is probably the most important part on whether or not you get hospitalized with an infection.

[Gamble1]

I saw an article saying there are more Covid-19 deaths in 2021 than 2020. I then saw someone spinning that as if it was either a bad job by Biden, or proof Trump did all he could do.

I'm sure all of this is out there but there has to be a fairly big spike at the first of the year as all of the holiday gathering infections were hospitalized and a certain number obviously didn't make it. That's also during a period of time when the vaccine was not widely available.

Then there will be the Delta surge on the graph. And that would have to be a lot of unvaccinated deaths unless someone is hiding something. I don't know where the majority of 2021 deaths fall though. If someone knows LMK. Otherwise I'll have to look it up when I get home.

So in a country where we have a vaccine, we have a higher death total in the year of the vaccine. We also have a political party, and especially wing of that party and base that is vehemently against vaccines.
I suspect a huge number of the 2021 deaths will have been of that party. I could be wrong, but with the surge of Delta in red states, the refusal to mask up, the refusal to take the vaccine, the belief in conspiracy theories to the point of thinking it's all a hoax all predominantly coming from that base pretty much seems to make my assertion a safe bet. But, I could be overlooking something and not knowing what I don't know in the equation.

It's sort of a meaningless argument really since most people with an agenda don't really care about viral prevelance in a community or the relevant factors you mention.

The country did not start out with the same level community spread in Jan 2020 as it did in January 2021. The exponential growth of the virus was completely on a different scale since it was not in every community all at once when Trump was dealing with it early in the outbreak.

Even with that the worst deaths per million 7 day rolling average was at that time of Trump in Jan of 2021. That average plummets from Feb to May and keeps going down until this latest surge in late July early August.

The difference now is that nearly all of the deaths are in the unvaccinated group.

[Bball]

I saw an article saying there are more Covid-19 deaths in 2021 than 2020. I then saw someone spinning that as if it was either a bad job by Biden, or proof Trump did all he could do.

I'm sure all of this is out there but there has to be a fairly big spike at the first of the year as all of the holiday gathering infections were hospitalized and a certain number obviously didn't make it. That's also during a period of time when the vaccine was not widely available.

Then there will be the Delta surge on the graph. And that would have to be a lot of unvaccinated deaths unless someone is hiding something. I don't know where the majority of 2021 deaths fall though. If someone knows LMK. Otherwise I'll have to look it up when I get home.

So in a country where we have a vaccine, we have a higher death total in the year of the vaccine. We also have a political party, and especially wing of that party and base that is vehemently against vaccines.
I suspect a huge number of the 2021 deaths will have been of that party. I could be wrong, but with the surge of Delta in red states, the refusal to mask up, the refusal to take the vaccine, the belief in conspiracy theories to the point of thinking it's all a hoax all predominantly coming from that base pretty much seems to make my assertion a safe bet. But, I could be overlooking something and not knowing what I don't know in the equation.

[Ozys Nepimpis]

The NBA and the NBPA have agreed to a reduction in pay of 1/91.6th of a player's salary for each game an unvaccinated player misses in their home market because of local laws. For example, Kyrie Irving would lose roughly $381,000 per game.

[Gamble1]

amazing given the natural advantages that rural living gives here...imagine the slaughter if the nation's rednecks were in cities...

There are some big disadvantages too though. The lack of access to healthcare being probably the biggest.

I am personally curious how much education is a predictor on vaccine uptake and how that is evolving. Back in February it was a greater predictor than race.

https://news.usc.edu/182848/education-covid-19-vaccine-safety-risks-usc-study/

[Ozys Nepimpis]

According to Sports Illustrated, the Mavericks are looking to trade Burke. The report states that Burke is still "studying" whether or not he wants to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and that is possibly factoring into Dallas' desire to find a deal for him.

He should be cut and should never play another NBA game in his life ....unvaccinated fringe role players should all be cut....Who TF they think they are....

[dal9]

Rural Americans dying at twice the rate of urbanites of Covid-19:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/...p02XylRyG_MjFA

amazing given the natural advantages that rural living gives here...imagine the slaughter if the nation's rednecks were in cities...

[Bball]

Rural Americans dying at twice the rate of urbanites of Covid-19:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/...p02XylRyG_MjFA

[Ozys Nepimpis]

https://theathletic.com/2853219/2021/09/30/aldridge-an-all-pro-in-so-many-ways-bradley-beal-comes-up-short-on-vaccines/

Aldridge: An all-pro in so many ways, Bradley Beal comes up short on vaccines

David Aldridge Sep 30, 2021 613
This is not pleasant to write, that Bradley Beal is all kinds of wrong when it comes to vaccines. But, he is.

It is not pleasant because Beal is a centered, thoughtful dude in a league full of look-at-me egomaniacs. It is not pleasant because Beal — against all advice from many of his fellow NBA stars, and certainly all of you terry0873s out there — has been ridiculously loyal to the team that drafted him, loyalty being in short supply just about everywhere these days, and not demanded a trade out of Washington. It is not pleasant because Beal is a smart and caring member of the community, who has been a benefactor for multiple classes of kids at the Ron Brown College Prep High School in Northeast, among myriad other local charitable endeavors. It is not pleasant because Beal and Natasha Cloud led their Wizards and Mystics teammates in marching for social justice in downtown D.C. in June 2020.

It is not pleasant because I don’t like calling out brothers that, otherwise, do the right thing almost all of the time, and are role models in the truest sense.

But he is wrong, the way Kyrie Irving and Andrew Wiggins are wrong, the way that the portion of the country that still, for varied reasons, refuses to get vaccinated, is wrong.

“I would like an explanation to, you know, people with vaccines, why are they still getting COVID?” Beal asked Monday during the Wizards’ media day. “If that’s something we’re supposed to be highly protected from, like it’s funny that it only reduces your chances of going to the hospital. It doesn’t eliminate anybody from getting COVID, right?” Why he was unvaccinated, he said, was private.

No reputable doctor or medical agency has said the vaccines “cure” or “prevent” COVID, as Beal seemed to be asserting — just as no reputable transportation expert has, or ever would, assert that wearing a seat belt and driving at the speed limit “prevents” you from being involved in or dying from car accidents. What doctors and other health experts have said is that getting the vaccine mitigates the risk of death or serious illness if you do get COVID. In short: you can still get COVID after getting vaccinated, but you have much less chance of winding up on a ventilator in ICU – or, in the morgue.

Yes, as Beal noted, there are breakthrough cases of vaccinated people getting COVID. But this is happening because so many people are still unvaccinated! The Delta variant, as with all variants, is a mutated version of the original COVID-19 virus. Variants survive and evolve in populations of, primarily, unvaccinated groups – and then cascade, like the ocean water over the decks of the Titanic, weighing the whole ship down. (If you saw the Denzel flick “Fallen,” when he’s a cop battling the devil, you remember how the devil bounced from person to person, “infecting” those who couldn’t resist him? That’s what variants do. The fewer people who are vulnerable, the less damage the viruses can do.)

So I asked Beal Tuesday if the “why” was private, what about the “how?” How did he arrive at his current position?

While asserting he stood by what he said Monday, Beal — who contracted COVID last summer, which knocked him off of the U.S. Olympic team, which went on to win the gold medal — took pains to note he is not an anti-vaxxer, nor is he anti-science.

“Along those lines, I also said I’m still considering getting the vaccine,” Beal said. “So one thing I want to make clear is I’m not sitting up here advocating or campaigning that ‘No, you should not get the vaccine.’ I’m not doing that. I’m not sitting up here doing that. I want to get that straight. I’m not sitting up here saying vaccines are bad, or saying this vaccine’s bad. I’m not sitting up here saying you shouldn’t get it. It is a personal decision between every individual. That’s it. And I have that personal right to keep it to myself and keep it between my family (and me). And I would like everybody to respect that.”

OK. Except that, in this case, as you know, you aren’t just impacting yourself. You’re impacting everyone with whom you come into contact. (The false equivalency of saying “my body, my choice” — implying similarity between having the right not to be vaccinated and women having the right to autonomy over their bodies — again, rather conveniently ignores the fact that you can’t get pregnant by coming into close contact with a pregnant woman.) Beal and other unvaccinated players won’t be living in a hermetically sealed village this year; they’ll be engaged with other players, with coaches, with medical staff and athletic trainers, with food preparers, with maids, with airline crews – any of whom could be vulnerable, for whatever reasons, public and non-public.

And, parenthetically — no team had a bigger and more devastating COVID outbreak last season than Beal’s Wizards.

And, parochially — Black people, as ever, are among those catching the most hell from COVID. I do not need lectures on the Tuskegee Experiment or other examples of medical racism. I also know, for myriad reasons, Black men tend to visit doctors less than they should. So it shouldn’t be a shock, I guess, that there’s a segment of the Black population among NBA players who are vaccine-hesitant. (This is not the case in the WNBA, where 99 percent of players are vaccinated.)

But it’s still difficult to understand the ineffectiveness of both the players’ union and the NBA in pushing public opinions on vaccinations. The union voted multiple times against vaccine mandates for its members, as other unions in other professions have. But why are there no public service announcements advocating getting vaccinated plastering the airwaves? Where is the SuperFriends PSA from LeBron, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo, or by other influencers? Why is a group that took the lead for two years in demanding attention be paid to the Black Lives Matter movement so docile on this subject?

If 90 percent of the NBA’s players are vaccinated, as the union noted this week, that would indicate an almost unheard-of majority of its constituents agree that vaccines are effective and safe.

“We should be applauding them, rather than criticizing them, and that’s not fair,” National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Michele Roberts said Tuesday.

Fair point.

But, why doesn’t that 90 percent then speak up with a unified voice — and, with the help of the league’s powerful PR apparatus, repeatedly? (I know the code of the NBA — players don’t take shots at other players on things like this. But the pro-vaccine players don’t have to mention the anti-vaxxers in their midst in appealing to the public to get vaccinated.) One suspects that the late David Stern would have had no problem browbeating all the relevant constituents into submission, demanding that if they want to participate this season in “my league,” as he would have put it, that they get the damn shot.

Per the CDC, more than 214 million people in the United States have received at least one dose of the vaccine as of this week, with 185 million of that total fully vaccinated. There have been more than 390 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the United States since last December. In the same time frame, there have been, per the CDC, 19,136 reported cases of breakthrough infections among vaccinated people, who have either been hospitalized (14,643) or died (4,493).

We’re not dealing in absolutes here, of course. But if 214,000,000 people have gotten at least one shot, and 19,136 of that number have had breakthrough infections – 77 percent of which were non-fatal – that means less than one-hundredth of one percent of all vaccine shots have yielded breakthrough cases. Or, if you like, more than 99 percent of vaccines administered have not produced any breakthrough COVID cases.

There is nothing political about either COVID-19, or Delta, or the vaccines now in place to fight them. Neither the viruses nor the vaccine know if the bodies they inhabit are Democrats or Republicans, or whether they love or hate Joe Biden or Donald Trump, whether they vote every election cycle or not at all, or whether or not they believe Anthony Fauci. Both the virus and the vaccine address the physical host’s strengths and weaknesses, and attack them. The young and healthy tend to react better than the old and infirm, which is why Beal’s assertion that he had no symptoms after getting COVID this summer other than losing his sense of taste misses the point entirely.

Beal acknowledged Monday that his parents, and his older brothers, have all been vaccinated, leaving the question of why he isn’t looming in the air. I know a lot of other people are in his ear, too. At the least, Washington currently doesn’t have the restrictive protocols for in-town players to be able to play in their home arenas that the Knicks and Nets and Warriors have.

So Beal can play at Capital One Arena even if he’s not vaccinated. But he should get vaccinated.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on the Hugh Hewitt podcast this week that he “wouldn’t want to be pointing a finger” at Irving for his stance, “but I would hope to be able to get him to understand that by allowing the virus to infect you, even though as an individual you say I’ll take my own chances, I don’t care, I’m young, I’m healthy, the likelihood that I’m going to get a serious disease is low, which is true. You can’t deny that. But what happens is that when you do get infected, it’s very well likely that you might pass that infection on to someone who would suffer very terribly from that virus. So you don’t want to be a vehicle for the propagation of an outbreak that unequivocally has devastated society.”

The miasma of misinformation about the vaccines in which so many still, unfortunately, traffic, continues to lead media companies like Facebook — and, as of Wednesday, YouTube — to ban people who continue to spread lies and confusion about the vaccines from their platforms.

It took a century — from the first polio epidemic in the U.S., in 1894, to 1994, when the International Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication in the Americas declared that wild poliovirus had been eliminated from the Americas — to finally get rid of polio, according to a timeline by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. And that’s with most everyone cooperating and taking the various polio vaccines when they became available.

The mind shudders when considering how long it may take until we get COVID under control, at this rate, with this much misinformation and unsupported skepticism in the air.

It will require people like Beal and Irving and Wiggins, and those others who remain hesitant, to think about not just the lowest common denominator, but the common good.

[Ozys Nepimpis]

Vaccination rate for NBA players rises to 95 percent, sources say

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/...nt-sources-say

In the end it can be only one....who is the last to take it....Kyrie Wiggins or Beal?

[Gamble1]

Man I can not imagine being charged 54,000 dollars for 2 covid test. Absolute insanity in Texas.

https://khn.org/news/article/pricey-covid-test-costs-more-than-tesla-surprise-billing-texas/

[dal9]

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/a-fool-and-his-money-are-lucky-enough-to-get-together-in-the-first-place-4

[graphic-er]

Any chance your employer allows you to work from home on a full time basis?

Eh….they are fine with it if circumstances require, having to quarantine or daycare issues. So it’s nice that they are flexible like that, but they have eluded they don’t think it’s a good long term situation. They have an old school approach to many things, and not having one of their most important employees in the office would interrupt how they have always done things.

[shags]

So my almost 2 year old’s daycare has been closed for the last 2 weeks, every caregiver got Covid. My daughter was incredibly lucky or just still had some robust antibodies from having COVID back in January.

I have been working from home the past 2 weeks and today was her first day back at daycare and my first day back in the office.

after my 25 minute drive to pick her up and then 45 minutes of bumper to bumper traffic on 96th street and thru the various construction zones with a crying toddler. I couldn’t help but think that everyday for the past 2 weeks I have been more productive with work, more productive around the house, been able to see my other daughter get off the bus in the afternoons, and get dinner on the table much earlier, and spend more quality time with the wife.

were these past 2 weeks perfect? No it certainly had its challenges with trying to work and entertain and stimulate a 2 year old and 5 year old. But I saved $400 in daycare costs and not once did I have to sit in my car and lose an 1 hour 15 min of my life.

sorry I just had to get it out there.

Any chance your employer allows you to work from home on a full time basis?