Hey, there! Log in / Register
Covid-19 numbers keep going up
By adamg on Fri, 03/26/2021 - 9:26pm
Covid-19 tallies for past month. Source.
For the second day in a row, Massachusetts exceeded 2,000 new Covid-19 cases, for the first time since Feb. 11 and 12, when the state was coming down from its post-Thanksgiving surge.
As older residents and essential workers keep getting vaccinated, the new cases are increasingly coming among young people. Acting Mayor Kim Janey reported today that more than 50% of Boston's recent Covid-19 cases are among people under 29. Nicholas Bauer has more on Boston.
The state reported 40 Covid-19 deaths today.
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Orange Line has too many
Orange Line has too many people now afternoons. Panhandlers walking up and down the cars with no mask in your face. New trains were taken away so the old ones with the petri dish seats that are never cleaned. This is one good example why Covid isn't going away .
Charlie Baker: worst of both worlds
Cases were going down. Steadily. Instead of staying the course, Baker lifts restrictions and cases go up. After an increase of cases, Baker announces further relaxation of Covid protocols. And cases continue to steadily climb.
Baker neither stays the course in order to keep the curve flat nor does he totally open the economy. It’s a wushu-washy mish-mash of half-measures, hedges, milquetoast, please as many people as possible leadership while delivering fair-to-middling results.
Baker imagines his policies balance the best of both worlds but the residents are left navigating the worst of both worlds.
Have a heart.
His hair caught fire.
Exactly what I expected of him
I’ll never understand his popularity.
He’s the worst middle manager ever.
Which doesn’t work when he’s the top executive.
What if the virus keeps mutating
so it never completely goes away? Is everything supposed to be kept closed indefinitely? At what point do we say we at least have to try to get back to "normal?"
It IS mutating, but there's an answer
So far, the approved vaccines work against the mutations, so herd immunity is possible. It's just that people don't want to wait until enough people are vaccinated.
Keep following CDC guidance, then
Here's the thing, viruses don't mutate outside a host. So if everyone will put their big kid panties on and quit whining and follow all the protocols -- yes every time, yes when you don't wanna, yes even when other people aren't -- the infection rate goes down and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to mutate.
Trying to "get back to normal" would mean making ever-present Covid deaths part of "normal".
I walked the length of Broadway in Southie yesterday afternoon
and the vast majority of people (mostly groups of those in their 20s) were maskless.
Outside, right?
You might as look up for meteorites because that's about the same odds.
Now, inside a restaurant? Different story.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but
Yes, I was talking about people outside, walking down the sidewalk. I walked 4 hours/16 miles one-way that day, and in no other place did I encounter maskless adults walking past me on the sidewalk. But on Broadway in Southie, it was the majority. And they were all in their twenties. Compare the odds to meteorites all you want.
Being outside doesn't confer special immunity
It has to be outside AND distanced to cut the risk.
Plenty of studies of this with outdoor smoking building up in crowded outdoor patio areas before COVID hit. There are also case investigations with the megachurches holding outside services without masks and without distancing. One outbreak spread out to a sizable percentage of residents in a rural county in Oregon. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/church-tied-oregons-largest-coro...
Sorry, but crowds outside really ain't much better than crowds inside if people are not wearing masks and keeping their distance. People in close quarters are still breathing each others exhalate.
p.s. I'd also like to see a reference for them odds you cite - scientific reference, not fox news.
Definitely not Fox!
One would have to watch FN to actually quote it.
I wasn't specific enough, and that's my fault. I assumed outside = sparse, i.e. the occasional, brief, distanced encounter with others. Admittedly a bad assumption. Example: walking the dog on local trails where you would pass others at a distance once every few minutes at the most. A crowded, outside T stop is a whole different ballgame. And I am still uneasy when we eat outside, even with tables spaced. Haven't eaten inside in > a year now.
I am amazed at the people out here in I-495-land that wear masks bike riding or on a trail in the middle of the woods. That's just me. I can go for 2+ hour walks and not run into anybody.
I’ll say this much
We’ve seen probably 9 months of people complaining about questionable activities outside in South Boston, yet somehow South Boston has avoided the Covid numbers other parts of the city (including my mostly mask compliant neck of the woods) have seen.
Bottom line- either Southie is doing a better job than they get credit for or the advice given by some isn’t as crucial as some think it is. I prefer to think the former myself, but still.
That's utterly disgusting!
It's disgusting how people don't give a shit who they end up sickening or killing. People who are in their 20's are more than old enough to know better than to flout rules for mask-wearing in public and social distancing, as well as the rules against having large gatherings of people, either indoors or outdoors. It's really sickening how irresponsible people can be.
The variants are here
We either can do 8-12 weeks of phase 1 while we vaccinate or we are going to see our biggest case wave yet. Hopefully much less death and sickness as the elderly and vulnerable have some protection, but a meaningful portion of the young are going to get COVID soon if they go back to indoor activities. Schools probably could have been more open for much of the year but probably should be fully remote for the rest of it.
School whiplash
I'm fully expecting schools to reopen quickly, and then to shut down as cases increase. Parents are going to love that, aren't they?
Not only are variants here...
...but this rise in cases creates the perfect environment for us to incubate one of our own. I wouldn’t be surprised if some new strain comes out of the recent Spring Break debacle in Florida. I also wouldn’t be surprised if De Santis moves heaven and earth to deny it, if it happens.
the deadliest wave of 1918 was in the summer
it was due to variants on the original virus and mostly attacked the young and healthy. Now is not the time to get lazy or this will be a multiyear pandemic (already is really). We need to keep the spread down as people get vaccinated or the vaccine will become useless if the virus mutates too much. Yes it's now out, yes it's spring. Stay the fuck home or wear a damn mask.
This is not time to abide by
This is not the time to abide by lessons of 1918
Ok...
...I'll bite. Why not? Granted that we know more now than we did when, but what lessons could reasonably be taken from 1918 that we'd do better to ignore now?
Interesting
Not true by a longshot, but if it will make you feel better, the Sept-Dec 1918 period wasn't the deadliest period of the influenza outbreak, despite what the statistics say.
Thanks Charlie Baker
Thanks Charlie Baker
Magic Charlie Baker
We all know Charlie Baker is a God who could make everyone wear masks and stay distant. Why he has such power yet refuses to use it is beyond my mortal comprehension.
/S
Between vaccines and warmer
Between vaccines and warmer weather and masks, just reopen and keep fingers crossed. Maybe restrict the use of air conditioning, to keep humidity up.
For variants, the million dollar question is the vaccine approval process. It's now been shown that mRNA vaccines can be engineered rapidly and reliably. Do we really want them to go through 6 months of trials? Tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of COVID deaths resulted from the time it took to conduct three phases of testing, plus the associated overhead. Even though the process was faster than in the past, it was still too slow from a cost/benefit perspective.
Yes, all vaccines need testing
Not all mRNA or standard vaccines made in the past have proved safe - not because of the technology, but because for reasons such as learning that vaccinated people got worse cases if they were exposed and caught the disease (since no vaccine is 100% effective) due to the way that particular virus worked. Yes, testing that existing vaccines work against variants is being done relatively quickly, but if they make a new vaccine things have to start over.
Getting from lab to emergency approval and deployment in 6 months was amazingly quick. They got there by compressing timelines in safe ways, such as writing protocols and getting them approved for later phase testing before knowing if a vaccine candidate would make it that far. Normally this process takes a few years. It was also only possible because the government guaranteed the costs of building/retooling plants and manufacturing large amounts pre-approval, to make it feasible to do all that work on spec. And should anything go wrong and a new vaccine turn out to be problematic, with that not having been caught before deployment because there wasn't testing, do you think bloody hell won't break loose?
There's already some preliminary approval for compressed testing
I recall seeing something about how the FDA has agreed that existing approved vaccines could be tweaked to have a slightly different RNA sequence without having to go through the full process all over again, if required to match a new strain. I imagine they'd still do the safety and efficacy trials, but maybe combined? Not sure. And I'd *hope* that they'd do challenge trials as well, but that might be too much to ask.
What's amazing is not that
What's amazing is not that the vaccine authorization took 6 months. What's amazing is that the vaccine design was developed in in a few hours.
Meanwhile, it took the FDA around 10 days to authorize the vaccine after receiving the Phase 3 results. How many deaths does that 10 day delay represent?
well 12 years plus a few hours
the mRNA vaccine was developed with the SARS outbreak but the spread didn't qualify as a pandemic. They had 12 years to develop the science and a few months to develop it specific to COVID-19 and test it. It wasn't rushed, it was timely.
Reopen and keep fingers crossed?
Oh honey.
I'm so sorry you failed basic math and biology so badly.
This resurgence was entirely predictable.
why?
how many lives would be saved by just doing 2 extra weeks of lockdown instead of semi-opening up every time there’s a decline in cases and then scratching our heads when cases *increase* 2 weeks later? it’s not like vaccine production and rollout would have to stop during that period.
What a bad idea
This may come as news to you, but crossing your fingers does not confer immunity.
Do you have a death wish, or do you just want to kill off everyone else?
A lot of people don't give a shit who they sicken or kill.
That's precisely why the Covid-19 virus pandemic continues to run so rampant and
out of control here in the United States at large. To his credit, President Biden has called for mask mandates to be strictly enforced. It was Donald Trump who got us into this Covid-19 mess in the first place by laughing off Covid-19 as a hoax, refusing to do anything about it while there was still a chance at containing and controlling it, and deliberately lying to the American people about how the Covid-19 was under control, when, in fact, it wasn't.
I get my shot Tuesday, the
I get my shot Tuesday, the 30th
Well....
I got my first Covid-19 vaccination on 2/28/21, and my second Covid-19 vaccination on 3/28/21, and I'm more than glad of it!
It takes 2 weeks for the vaccine to kick in, so I wouldn't be considered fully vaccinated just yet, but I've continued to wear a mask out in public, and to social distance.