Are they actually certain those people were vaccinated? Or were they just claiming to be vaccinated as an excuse to stop wearing masks? Living in a very red state, I could easily see a fair percentage of people just lying about it.
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You mean, “suicide cult”?
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Also, I would urgently point out that this issue is not entirely dead-vs-not-dead.
Even mild cases can have significant residual effects.
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No, it’s a death cult. They don’t care who they kill in pursuit of power. Most of the leadership is vaccinated. The ones who are spreading the message but remain unvaccinated are marks and their rubes are out killing the unbelievers in viral suicide bombings. But the cult is founded upon the worship of death.
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Confident to the femtopercentage?
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Good point differentiating those at the top covertly vaccinating themselves versus those below whipped up into an exploitative anti-establishment frenzy.
But the thought of a suicidal spiral came to mind, because of the eventual damage dealt to the political and economic base. For the GOP, there must have come the realization that COVID illness and death can erase any gain that gerrymandering and “Libural” name-calling and finger-pointing could yield from their super-spreader clustered voting minority.
A Death Cult in command, yes. But ultimately suicide for the larger vessel. The day the ark that carries Evangelical Christianity and the full mass of Right-Wing Conservatism finally capsizes, we should expect a special podcast episode of The Futility Closet to air.
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Makes me wonder if those with long-term will only persist with their denial of the virus, given that they will likely forget that they ever had it in the first place.
I say that only because my mother had a major stroke well after clearly having Alzheimer’s. She often is mystified as to why she can’t use the whole one side of her body. Sometimes she’s not even aware that there’s something wrong in the first place.
Get my drift?
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If the population of MA is 64% vaxxed and the population of the cluster is 74% vaxxed then if the pop of people that could have been infected in this cluster is representative of the state as a whole, the vaxxed people were infected at a higher rate than the unvaxxed. That seems unlikely! Maybe the potential cluster candidates were more like 90% vaxxed, but it still paints a grim picture of how transmissible to vaxxed folks this variant is…
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I wish I didn’t… This shit is scary.
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Well there is a tendency for diseases to evolve over time to be more contagious, but less lethal. After all, dead people aren’t walking around spreading virus and infecting many others, so more deadly strains tend to spread less.
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That’s not true in any significant way over human time scales. Smallpox, measles, polio, diphtheria all remained quite contagious and deadly up until vaccines brought them under control. In diseases that are hugely fatal (rabies, ebola) they cannot become terribly contagious or they would run out of vulnerable population to infect, but in all the big actors across time, there is a tendency over centuries to perhaps be less lethal, but even that is debatable. And nothing that will help us in the next wave, certainly.
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School shootings, pandemics, this cartoon works for all kinds of things that should be preventable.
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I would add that it’s not the disease that’s evolving to become less fatal but the collective immune systems of the population affected by it that is reacting and adapting to the disease. Even the evolutionary pressure of lack of propagation of the genes of those who die of the infection is a very minor effect compared to the active adaptation of the immune system of individuals within a population in response to exposure to the disease.
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Here’s the actual CDC study behind the news story:
Interesting that 85% of the infected individuals in this cluster were men. Hard to know how much of that gender disparity can be attributed to the demographics of which people are more likely to go out drinking at sports bars or whatever, but it’s a pretty significant detail.
Edit to add: here a key section of the report:
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The problem is that you can’t meaningfully speculate from within the cluster. You’ve got to look at the rate of transmission among the population at large to do a meaningful risk assessment. (You’re also right to point out that we don’t know what the situation of vaxxed vs unvaxxed is within the group that was exposed where the cluster arose, which makes “speculating from within” that much more problematic.)
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IIRC, Ebola isn’t actually very contagious. It’s deadly, and incredibly gruesome – having someone’s blood fall out through their skin and every hole in them is nasty – but there’s a reason why Ebola epidemics have been pretty well contained, and tend happen in places where there’s poor access to health care, meaning less PPE and more people caring for their sick relatives, giving the virus more chances to spread.
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Thanks for that visual, I’m’a take a break now.
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Why do those libruls hate our freedumbs so much? s/
But seriously. This is what we get when basic fucking science and disease prevention protocols get politicized.
Hopefully someone is working hard on a variant booster, and I’ll be first in line to get one (as well as continuing to wear my stockpiled N95s every goddamn where).
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I thought it was very contagious in the sense that one is highly likely to get it if exposed to the patient’s fluids, compared to the same level of exposure to other diseased fluids (or other vectors). However, the extremely debilitating nature of Ebola keeps it from spreading very quickly generally.
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