😢 This is why I'm having to pull back for my unvaccinated kids. People are untrustworthy about this during flu season, and they continue to be now with Covid. I know it sucks to have to cancel things and for your kids to miss out on something due to illness, but not willfully spreading that sucky illness to others seems like Golden Rule 101 to me.

I don't know anyone who claims no problems at all, and anyone claiming that based on anecdotes is no different than you claiming the vaccine is more harmful than the disease based on your anecdotes. Neither one is particularly relevant to reality. What is relevant is the actual data on illness, reactions, hospitalizations and deaths. We have lots of that at this point.

I had illness that was so classic for Covid and lasting symptoms that are common of long Covid, and I will always wonder, but never know if that's what it was (I believe you and I were sick at the same time, in March 2020 IIRC).

Oh. I guess I'm not thinking of those numbers as coming from the government, but maybe that's because they haven't been my primary source of virus news throughout all this. I follow virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and public health people and keep tabs on what they're saying. The CDC obviously is a public health agency, and I do keep up with what they are saying, but I also think they have done a particularly poor job with the messaging aspects of this from the very start. I hadn't considered Hep B. I mean, I was aware that lots and lots of vaccines are a series, but was thinking most of those were done in kids. I had to have Hep B in college as a health care provider though, and it was pretty new then, and I had three shots, as an adult.

That's actually super helpful for me, thanks for saying it. I have had terrible word finding problems the last couple years, and it drives me crazy and makes me worry sometimes. I always know what the word I'm looking for means, I just can't seem to grab it from my brain (I have this badly with names sometimes, too). I would chalk it up with my other long-Covid-like symptoms, except I think it actually started when my last child was born, and is likely more of a sleep deprivation thing.

I'm sorry, I'm not following which part of what you said is BS from the government. I thought we were talking about whether the 39% number out of Israel is accurate. Can you clarify?

How I would handle the driving thing depends on so many things. Do you know why he chose this job that’s so far away? Are there comparable jobs closer to you? Is he learning good life skills from working right now? I drove a kid that far, there and back for work for a couple years. That was two hours of drive time a day, which was a huge monopoly of my time, but this kid really needed that job for various reasons, and it was in their best interest for me to help make that happen, so I did. With a different kid or different circumstances, I wouldn’t necessarily have done that, and I know for some family circumstances, that wouldn’t work. For me it was like the way some families spend a lot of time on their kid’s sport, because the kid really needs that This was a mental health and life skills benefit. I can’t tell if there’s anything like that with this job. One major difference is that my kid didn’t just get the job and then tell us about it and say we needed to drive her. We said ahead of time we’d make the transportation work somehow I won’t address the why is he still driving and wrecking your car since you said that’s covered.

Awwww, I’m sorry.

Totally agree, especially now that you've given the Nate Silver context 😉.

If they are no longer shedding enough virus to show up on a PCR test, I think it's thought that then they wouldn't be shedding virus to make anyone sick either. There are occasionally those cases where someone tests negative and then turns positive again though, so I don't know if that means people still need to wait the full time, even with a negative test. This is really important, if true. That 39% number got so much press, and was definitely disappointing. I'm going to be looking for more info. I see what he's saying in his thread about them having used the wrong denominator due to the area they were focused on. Would be really encouraging to find out the numbers haven't dropped that much. On a similar note, I want to look more at the CDC numbers on transmission and how much of that came solely from the P-town outbreak. Because that was not a situation that extrapolates to all other situations.

Although oddly, I've seen recently that they don't seem to have data showing that viral load is correlated to disease severity. It seems like it would be, though now it strikes me that the more recent data could be confounded. If vaccinated people who contract the illness have viral loads just as high, but don't have serious disease because they have a primed immune system, that's not going to give a good idea about what viral load does in someone who is not vaccinated and has to mount a new immune response to it.

Sure. This is put together by someone with an aerosol science background, and the masks are tested while worn (with a mask port). There are tabs that show the test setup, if you're interested, and a FAQ to go along with it: Master Mask Testing Data Set

This is one of the scary thoughts I don't like to spend too much time on. A lot of people who are unconcerned are unconcerned because it's not as bad for young people. With the way this thing is mutating, and young people being the least covered, we have no reason to feel secure that it won't mutate in a way that is suddenly much more severe for young people. I'm not sure why that isn't reason enough for some people to want to stop it. It's been being said for ages that the more transmission we have, the more likely we were going to get a variant eventually that was worse, and we did (Delta). There's no reason to think that it will stop there. As long as we have high rates of transmission, we're all still at risk of something worse coming of this (and now I'll pack that thought back away in the back of my brain where I will try not to think about it too much).

I think we are talking past each other. I know what she says she is basing the data on, but no one else can verify any of this and it it’s an addendum to a lawsuit that’s so full of so much other fantasy that I don’t know why anyone would just take her at her word that she has this data that no one else does.

A note on ease of breathing. If you look at the mask data chart I shared recently, there’s a column for pressure drop. That’s actually important, because in addition to indicating how easy and comfortable it is to breathe in, masks with too great a differential will actually cause more air to go around the sides of the mask. That particular chart also indicates whether the mask collapses when you breathe in, or not. For sports, obviously not collapsing is much preferred. Unfortunately, that chart does not include a lot of the masks being discussed in this thread, though. It has predominantly KF94s and N95s, though it does have some reusable masks tested as well.

I was just thinking about this very thing as I came out from an in store pickup (I hadn’t been in a store in over a week and saw masking is back up over 70%). I was thinking that I think my feelings about people getting vaccinated have been heavily influenced by the way people behaved in the year leading up to vaccines even being available. They were so many people fighting against wearing masks or not having large gatherings or doing anything else to minimize the spread during that whole time. The frustration of so many people endangering everyone else and making this worse than it had to be was already high. I think if everyone had been working together and doing their part to minimize spread and not infect others, the feeling going in to the vaccine stage would have been different and it would’ve been easier to have understanding about some people just having concerns about the vaccine itself. I’ve been there with vaccine concerns, so that’s something I can actually understand, but against the backdrop of everything else, and all the misinformation and ridiculous politics stuff, it’s something entirely different.

That was super rude. Agree with you there.

This post prompted me to look to see if there have been any updated stats for CFR for people my age with my (very common) health condition, and it looks to be holding at about 6%. So forgive me if I’m more than a little grumpy at people downplaying the risk of this illness. eta: fortunately, I’m vaccinated. But, if I were among those who’d been misled by people pushing vaccine misinformation, I could be among those who are unvaccinated and would be at very high risk right now. I expect at least half of those at the same level of risk I am have no idea that they are at that much risk.

We know nothing of what the data is she is basing this on, but more than that, this document is an addendum to a lawsuit that is so full of crazy that it's hard to believe the people filing it believe a word it says (it's quite likely they don't). I'm no legal scholar, but I have a hard time seeing them do anything but throw it out. I mean, the whole thing is based on the premise "There is in Fact no Serious or Life-Threatening Disease or Condition" which is just plain sick.

I don't like those numbers at all, and they're definitely not good news, but I'm keeping in my mind that their adult population is very highly vaccinated (and the most at risk are almost all vaccinated). So, even the fact that only half the cases are in the fully vaccianted shows it's still reducing cases (yes, I know that's weak...it's not doing nearly as much as I want it to be doing). I'm wondering how they count those seriously ill. Is that the total number of people in the country currently classified as seriously ill? Those numbers initially seemed terrible to me, but if it is an overall number, then there are only around 200 people currently seriously ill with covid out of a country of over 9 million. That would indicate they have been pretty successful squashing the virus. I'll have to go look for their current covid curves.

Doing the math, it's a tiny percentage of people that were infected both places. It's especially good to hear they didn't catch it at work where protocols are in place.

I haven't used this one, but have heard it mentioned by others and I see it's on good sale. It depends on how big your kids wearing them are, though, because it's an adults size: https://www.outdoorresearch.com/us/adrenaline-sports-face-mask-kit-285932

Does anyone want to do the math about effectiveness? It looks like we have enough data to do that. Knowing what percentage of the population is vaccinated and comparing how many vaccinated versus unvaccinated got it will give the relative efficacy of the vaccine. I could try, but I’d have to think for a while how that particular calculation goes. eta: never mind, it looks like we don’t know what percentage of the population there is vaccinated, only what percentage of those who are infected. I assume from the statement that they would expect four times more infections if no one was vaccinated that they may have done that math to get them there.

Oh, darn. I'm sorry it's gotten worse. I hope they are able to get him pain free again.

I was just looking at the mask data now that I'm on computer, and the Airwasher is just a smidge below 7". But, I also noticed the Masklab boat style masks measure right at 7". I don't quite know the deal with them, because they say they are KF94 style, but aren't actually made in Korea. They did peform well in tests, though. And they come in some amazing prints (which your dh probably doens't care about). How about this avocado one? With any of these (and any mask), it's good to make sure you pinch the nose wire downward toward your cheeks when you put it on, to form the seal (not just pinching your nose). The tests show a significant increase in effectiveness just from that actually. The Masklab ones come from here: https://masklab.hk/collections/kf-series