I have spent the day swabbing kids for covid or RSV (and sometimes for both.) I have 33 appointments today, in a schedule where 25 is full. It’s a Tuesday, in August, and local schools have either just started (today) or started last week. This Fall has potential to be epically awful. And we still face parents who insist on their “freedom” from masking, vaccine mandates and social distancing requirements. Scholastic sports are back in full swing with no limitations on participants or spectators. We are not going to enjoy this at all, I fear.
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What’s your guess for why the latest surge in India declined so rapidly? I haven’t heard any theories. I know that the last time India had a surge that suddenly declined back in September and October scientists were trying to figure out what they did right.
Then, of course, they had the huge surge this spring.
As much as we’ve learned over the last 18 months or so, I’m really getting the impression that there’s more that we don’t know about this virus than there is that we do know.
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As @anon29537550 says: WDKS.
I certainly have no answer for you about how India is managing so well.
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WDKS still holds after 18 mos. That’s actually a very small slice of time, as science goes. We will learn, and will find out a ton about viral interactions with human hosts along the way. But for now, there will be a ton of “wow, that’s weird.” And “no, that was not supposed to happen.”
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Almost simultaneous. It’s almost like we’ve been doing this for a while now!
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Fair enough, but since you said “in every other case, the numbers might increase substantially in another country, but then they go back down again as the country responds.” I figured you were attributing the result to something specific that India was doing.
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Alternative headline: Covid gets grossed out that Florida’s sewage got mixed into it
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Ah, I see.
Yeah, I guess I’m assuming there’s SOMETHING they’re doing right, because deus ex machina is not a real thing, but I don’t know what it is. And it sounds like, neither do they at this point!
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It helps that Kári rules Iceland like his own little genetic fiefdom. He’s definitely done a lot of good there (also with Íslendingabók, the combined genetics and genealogy database) but I’ve always gotten Musk/Bezos vibes from the way he asserts himself on the national stage.
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I’m concerned ya’ll are drinking too much cola… /s
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Angling for some heirloom measles?
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Anyone who has been paying attention probably saw this coming, but we have now run out of covid swabs, and they are on backorder. That is one way to make sure the outbreak isn’t recorded!
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Short video (2:35):
Full video (still short, 4:45):
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Deadline also notes that Unite For Strength doesn’t have its hands totally clean either, with members of both saids having “said, tweeted, and retweeted questionable comments during the pandemic.” Drescher herself, for example, tweeted last year that 5G cell signals are causing cancer, hurting animals, and helping to spread viruses like COVID-19 (Drescher is a cancer survivor who runs the organization Cancer Schmancer). Deadline says that tweet got flagged with one of those “this isn’t true” messages. Everybody’s just calling out everyone else for any potentially questionable thing they’ve ever done.
Weirdly, though, things seem much less contentious when the two sides actually talk. Modine and Rapp have agreed to do a public town hall of some sort, and the leaders on both sides say they support mandatory COVID vaccines and continued mask-wearing. The votes will be tallied in early September, and then… odds are, your life won’t be impacted at all. At the very least, some other famous person will be introduced as the SAG-AFTRA president at the next SAG Awards, and we’ll know that they fought a vicious battle to get there.
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Thank goodness he’s vaccinated, right?
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Supposedly he’s fully vaccinated and currently asymptomatic. Unfortunately there is a real chance that, if he is lucky enough to fully recover with no serious illness, many Texans will just take that as evidence that the virus is no big deal and see it as a vindication of his anti-mask policies.
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