One thing I've learned during this pandemic is that a whole lot of organizations were NOT PREPARED to suddenly need to be doing so much public relations work. Apparently there's an enormous shortage of effective spokespeople out there.

This is the one I remember from China last spring, showing only 2 cases out of 1245 outside: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v1

They cite a few different studies in the full article. This one found 95 out of 10,925 outside transmissions worldwide, and all 95 were from Singapore construction sites: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32656368/. I remember reading about studies very early on out of China that showed virtually no outdoor transmission. A study from Ireland showed .1%. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/outdoor-transmission-accounts-for-0-1-of-state-s-covid-19-cases-1.4529036?_ga=2.24768063.440780849.1618007143-575568946.1618007143 There MAY be more outdoor transmission, but I haven't seen any studies that show this to be case, and I've seen quite a few that show it to be extremely low.

Speaking of poor communication from the CDC... I've been operating somewhat with the idea that outside=safe for the past year; basically no masks with people we know well and know to be pretty cautious (it's a small group), no asks when walking in uncrowded areas, masks in crowded public spaces. My kid wears a mask on the playground, but it's because he's more comfortable doing that; I'd be fine with him taking it off. We nervously let him play baseball this spring, even though we figured he'd be the only kid on the team wearing a mask (we were right). (And then, of course, after we agonized over the decision, one of his coaches got covid a couple of weeks in. But no one else seems to have gotten it from him). I was more cautious back in the winter when numbers were terrible; less so as they've gone down lately. SO...all of that is preface to how not reassuring I found it when the CDC started easing guidelines on outside masking a couple of weeks ago by assuring everyone that less than 10% of transmissions happen outside. I always understood that figure to be WAY, WAY less than 10%. 10% is still like 60,000 deaths in the US, so...NOT GREAT. But then it appears that the CDC's messaging was again confusing, and the actual number is, in fact, likely much lower and much closer to what I assumed when I made decisions over the past year: That benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html (Of course, that doesn't necessarily suggest unmasked at the playground is fine, since that can certainly involve crowds and close conversation). All of this to say that I don't think it's that the CDC has gotten WAY BETTER at messaging in the past two weeks just because their latest guidelines seem to veer so drastically in the other direction. I think they're still bad at messaging, but they're bad in a bunch of different ways. Whatever you think of the new guidelines, they've certainly caught everyone off guard and left a whole lot of people/businesses/organizations/etc. scrambling to figure out what to do with them.

I've got to say that I don't find the speculation that there's only a massively higher death rate for kids in Brazil because there's not enough room for all the kids with COVID in the hospitals particularly reassuring. I really don't want my kids to get any disease they're likely to be hospitalized for, even if there's plenty of room for them there.

My link is a summary of the full article Bill linked to, I think.

I think it's the same one I linked--it looked at 8 different Chinese studies (which I assume would mean from very early on in the worldwide pandemic). ETA: and then they developed a model based on those studies.

It did find 24% of spread was by people who never developed symptoms, though, which is pretty significant if it's correct.

My brother walked around (and went to work) for weeks with "just a cold" until he lost his sense of taste and smell and finally got tested for covid.

What are you basing that on? Here's a summary of a recent study that says the opposite: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/most-covid-19-cases-are-spread-by-people-without-symptoms

Baseball is the thing we eased up and let my 8 year old do this spring, so it's my frame of reference right now 🙂 . But, yeah, I've just been thinking also about how we view other illnesses in kids; the party line is that covid is nearly always mild in kids, which makes me think about how we mitigate risk with other childhood illnesses. Like I treat strep throat with antibiotics even though I'm generally a reluctant antibiotic user because there's a small risk of serious complications like scarlet fever, et. al. I'm just kind of musing and getting off topic, though.

Yes, although how likely an illness is to drag on and be miserable does affect how far I'll go to avoid having my kid get it. 5 weeks is half a kid baseball season!

Aside from the Italian study, what I've seen quoted most often is the figures from the Office for National Statistics in the UK: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/long-covid-and-children-the-unseen-casualties-of-covid-19#How-many-children-are-long-haulers? I just read an article about how at least 5 hospitals in the US have set up clinics for long haul kids.

I haven't done Warby Parker, but all three of us who wear glasses get all of ours from Zenni, and we've never had any problems with them. Mail order glasses are the way to go for sure. I can't believe how much I used to pay!

Yeah. Lots of reasons, obviously. Like people not getting vaccinated.

What do you think should be done about it?

Yes, the covid school dashboard is all self-reported data, and last I checked the number of schools reporting that didn't have a mask mandate was so small it was pretty much meaningless. When I was looking at it back in the fall/winter, it was very, very heavily tilted toward schools in New York. I've compared school districts near me with and without mask mandates, and the difference is stark.

Just asked my 19 year old who has always had (annoying but pretty infrequent) tinnitus (and a hearing loss in one ear) if the vaccine worsened it or affected it at all. He says no, not that he's noticed. I was thinking about this for some reason last night and about how I had occasional tinnitus for the first time ever dating to our mystery 6 week long cough/maybe it was walking pneumonia? but the timing sure was weird-thing last March/April. I googled this morning to see if it's common to develop tinnitus after pneumonia, and I just got a bunch of results about tinnitus after covid. So. Hmm. I hate unsolveable mysteries.

yes, that's why I like to look at more controlled settings like schools where enforcement is easier. Though certainly not universal, I'm sure. Disney World would be a great place to study how effective a universally enforced mask mandate is, but of course contact tracing isn't nearly good enough here for that to work. But I still volunteer to go there and study it 😉

I'm perfectly capable of thinking that multiple groups/people acted stupidly here. I'm a multi-tasker like that.

Just read the yesterday's newsletter from Amber Schmidtke, the immunologist I follow who mostly talks about GA numbers. She's not happy. She mentions stuff I hadn't thought enough about, like how it's still the most vulnerable populations who have been vaccinated at the lowest rate AND who say they want the vaccine "ASAP" but still have barriers to access. https://www.facebook.com/AmberSchmidtkePhD/posts/303829588055385

I have no idea what that has to do with whether people will refuse boosters because of vaccine reactions. I agree that improved sick leave policies would likely be a bigger win for health care in America than universal masking in Target.

I'm still not sure what you're trying to say. Yes, it's appalling how bad protections for workers are in this country and how many people will work through illnesses (or, I imagine, bad vaccine reactions) because they don't have sick leave. That's probably a lot of the reason we had such uncontrolled spread here. Uncontrolled covid causes much more lost work time than vaccine reactions. Both things are true.

That means 70-80% are symptomatic (and quarantines are required even for asymtomatic cases if there's a known close contact in an unvaccinated person).

It will indeed be unfortunate if enough people make that choice that covid comes back at previous levels. It will cause a whole lot more missed days of work AND a whole lot more death and serious illness. Of course, around half of the people who get vaccinated report no side effects at all other than a sore arm, and only around 1-2% report severe reactions that "prevent daily activity." So your husband is a definite outlier is the good news.