A 900-person Covid delta cluster in Massachusetts includes 74% vaccinated people

[ecologist]

Thank you for posting this. Seeing the news headlines, giving the percentage vaccinated among the infected, has been driving me crazy. It is such a stupid basic probability mistake, and sends exactly the wrong (“omg the vaccine doesn’t work”) message.

[bryan]

@XantheStone

Meanwhile I looked at the headline and wondered what a goo-person was.

I got all the way to adulthood before figuring out that the wife in one of the old-school newspaper comics was named Gladys. I mean, I knew that 6ladys was definitely not what was intended, but for the life of my that’s all I could ever see.

[wazroth]

They should teach signal detection theory in middle school.

[AnthonyC]

@AnthonyC

The fact that none of the public discussion seems to be even asking these questions is disturbing. Either the results are real and need to prompt a major reanalysis of huge, core questions about how covid spreads, or the results are highly suspect and should not be the basis of changes in policy recommendations.

Follow-up: Seems like at least some at the White House are thinking somewhat clearly about this now. Glad to see this. Wish more of the major news sources attempted basic numeracy before publishing about it in the first place.

White House slams NYT, Washington Post over tweets on CDC COVID data

[smf]

I saw the headline and literally said, “OK, let’s click on the comments. Hopefully someone on Boing Boing will give me the math to make me feel better”. Thanks.

Is that a reasonable assumption though? According to google in Massachusetts only 63.7% of the population is fully vaccinated, not 99%.

I was going to claim that folks on The Cape are more likely to be vaccinated than the folks in rural Mass. Just returned from there and the places we haunt are mostly pretty liberal, reasonable, and want to keep their business open. But the Cape has an interesting mix of liberals and conservatives. (Crazy that that feels like a proxy for vaccinated and unvaccinated, no?) According to this it has less than a 25% vaccination rate! According to this Provincetown has a 114% (no typo) vaccination rate! So: Who knows?

[dreamofthedarkstar]

@RickMycroft

I’m still trying to figure out the “libertarian” billionaires funding anti-lockdown movements and manufactured junk science.

• Total ideological brain-meltdown when faced with a public health crisis that really does require central planning and action.
• Wanting to keep the wheel of capitalism turning and to hell with the workers.
• The initial Blue State and continuing racist angle.

Now I’m wondering if they really do have some profit motive for their “kill grandma” strategies.

There is, of course the “to hell with the workers” aspect. Can’t allow the peons to stop giving their labor on the cheap, so that billionaires can profit off it. (for every dollar a worker gets paid for their effort, they make a significantly higher amount of profit for the company–google seems to be failing me on finding the current numbers)

If a lot of people die, their property (homes, land, stock portfolios) end up back on the market, where billionaires (or rather, the S Corps that they use to obfuscate their income and holdings in order to avoid needing to pay any tax) snap them up, increasing the percentage that billionaires own. (noting that real-estate, and stock portfolios are things that tend to appreciate in value, and having possession of them also gives leverage over other companies (stock-holder voting), and municipalities (owning lots of land)). And, if lots of people die off in a short time, or are hit hard financially because of the outbreak, the market will be temporarily glutted, lowering prices, making it even easier for the billionaires to take over. Notice the latest trend in home-buying: Corps buying in order to turn them into rental properties and/or leverage them for equity. (similar to how corporate raiders leverage the corporations they buy to extract the money out). So, the pandemic is a huge opportunity to the obscenely rich.

Investors are buying up single-family homes across the US

First-time homebuyers are getting outbid by big companies

[dreamofthedarkstar]

@bcsizemo

I’m confused here. To my understanding none of the vaccines prevent you from being infected. They prime your immune system to deal with a novel virus itself, essentially acting as a catalyst. Which means it was going to be like this. Perhaps if everyone was vaccinated in a very short order (perhaps less than a month window) you’d see a fairly sizeable drop in severe cases, but the virus would still be out in the population. It is exactly the same as a flu vaccine. The goal is to reduce your symptoms, not prevent your body from becoming infected.

THIS!

Nobody (CDC, Fauchi, etc) ever claimed that getting vaccinated would prevent you from catching it. It’s not a big whole-body condom. All they ever said was that it would protect you from severe illness when you are infected (instead of dying, you only get really really sick, or instead of getting really really sick, you just get mildly sick), because the vaccine gave your body a head start at fighting it off. They did hold out hope that the vaccine would help your body fight it off quickly enough to lower your “viral payload”, so that you didn’t have much virus in you to spread to others. But Delta has gotten around that limitation by being so severely contagious.

[Gyrofrog]

Purely anecdotal, but a coworker and I (both of whom had the thing, a couple of months apart) were both wondering about this.

On the other hand, I’m not getting any younger, either – the smartest I ever felt was when I was in my mid-20s, it was like the crest of the wave – and I’m more than twice as old now (though, granted, not twice as dumb).

[RickMycroft]

There’s also those olden lifetime company pensions that they’re still paying out on, if they haven’t found a way to screw them. Covid especially hits that age group hard.

[Gyrofrog]

@simonize

over time to be more contagious, but less lethal.

@anon29537550

there is a tendency over centuries to perhaps be less lethal, but even that is debatable.

@DukeTrout

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

IIRC after the 1918 pandemic, this is how we’ve wound up with seasonal flu. But I think I read this in the newspaper so take that FWIW.

@RickMycroft

Wanting to keep the wheel of capitalism turning and to hell with the workers

Well, with subscribe-n-save and (I suppose?) smart appliances, we’re at the point where they don’t even need human consumers anymore…

[subextraordinaire]

The mother of a friend of ours passed away and he sold her house in February. Her home is located in a very desirable (and unincorporated) area in OC, adjacent to LA County. We stopped by the open house and his realtor said he just got an offer of $1.39 million CASH.

My husband and I were speechless. With Covid, a sluggish economy and even with the help of their parents, it seemed crazy that young people can come up with that amount of money. The more I thought about this the more I think that investor group are hiring people to bid on homes.

[RickMycroft]

Sometimes they use the equity from their primary home to make the down payment, letting them climb the ladder while pulling it up behind them. (And setting up for a horrible crash if the bubble pops.)

Nearly 20% of GTA Homeowners Under 35 Own More Than One Property

[Nightflyer]

@subextraordinaire

The more I thought about this the more I think that investor group are hiring people to bid on homes.

The Wealthy Keep Buying All The Houses And Decided You Should Accept Being A Renter

[anon29537550]

Honestly, this is one of those things that, while statistically valid on a population basis, is pretty useless on an individual case. Exactly the sort of thing that allows the covidiots to say “I don’t know anybody this happened to, so it must not be a big deal.” Also worth keeping in mind we don’t know what happens next. Maybe this gets better in a while, or maybe it really is a setup for dementia. The truth almost certainly is somewhere between the two, but truly, WDKS.

[anon65652885]

Or show them some xkcd: “Remember, right-handed people commit 90% of all base rate errors.”

Base Rate

[moortaktheundea]

@Gyrofrog

IIRC after the 1918 pandemic, this is how we’ve wound up with seasonal flu.

Probably not, we have records of Influenza pandemics and seasonal flu well before the 1918 pandemic. The language gets harder to sort out before the 19th century, but the traces are there. If you look at the flu pandemics of the 1500s you can see a lot of our early public health measures struggling to be born. 1557 influenza pandemic - Wikipedia

[anon29537550]

True. In fact, one theory (and it is a theory) as to why it was that the 1918 pandemic was so much harder on young adults than on older folks. There was a pandemic strain in the late 1800’s that was immunoligically similar, although not nearly as virulent.

[Otherbrother]

So it turns out there’s some specific circumstances surrounding the Provincetown cluster that may help explain why 85% of the infected folks were men, and give some reason to be hopeful that it won’t be especially typical of virus behavior among vaccinated folks moving forward.

First of all, I want to be super clear that I’m not victim blaming here. Most of the infected in the Provincetown cluster were fully-vaccinated folks who were relying on the advice of a number of public health professionals at the time who stated that life for the fully-vaccinated could largely go back to normal.

That said, Provincetown has an annual well-attended (and awesome) “Bear Week” in early July, and while it was “officially” canceled this year a lot of folks attended anyway. According to a (gay) doctor friend of my sister who is familiar with the event, this festival tends to include a fair number of folks making out with strangers. This doctor speculates that under those circumstances much more virus is shared between respiratory tracts than other types of socialization such as indoor dining. It would appear that such high levels of virus can overwhelm the immune systems of even the fully vaccinated and lead to higher levels of illness than would be expected from lesser exposures.

So do what you will with that information.

[bryan]

@Otherbrother

this festival tends to include a fair number of folks making out with strangers

The last risqué event I attended featured all gender spin the bottle, which I did a bit of, and a trans kissing booth that other commitments kept me from. I’ve thought a lot about both of those things over the past 18 months, and while they both still appeal to me in the same base way, I don’t think there’s any way in hell I could do either of these things now, even if I was freebasing booster shots on the way to the venue.