Did you hear that? Like this voice somewhere outside the window. Weird.

I'm trying to fix my kitchen faucet, but I can't turn the shut-off valves to start. You can google instructions, but really it's going to be hard to beat someone being there.

Anyway, today is paint the ceiling day.

Oooh! A mural? Graffiti? Whatcha thinking?

White semi-gloss.

Then in going to paint the walls in off-white.

Preparing the canvas, that makes sense. Post some photos after you go full Jackson Pollack, though.

Yes, I miss seeing pieces in the mainstream media explaining the virus. Have to keep looking at Stat News and Ed Yong's articles every 2 weeks in The Atlantic.

The protests/riots provided an opportunity to talk about something else, and now the media is back to election talk.

Here is a piece from NPR about how we have still seen practically zero transmissions between children or from children to adults, with specific examples at the US's YMCA child care locations and in Iceland. This is with maximum groups of 9 children per caretaker but it's very good to hear.

7: Do I need to flip the house over?

Remember the breathless reports about the first positive trial about remdesivir? Not much coverage about what seems like bigger news, that a widely available and not monopolized steroid led to people with severe illness having much better chance of recovery / speed of recovery.

Remember the incredibly premature news that came out about the Moderna RNA vaccine, followed by the news of Moderna executives selling all their stock after the stock went up? Not really any vaccine news since then but things have continued to be objectively news. I also haven't seen any investigation about whether Moderna's apparent pump-and-dump was a scam or just greedy/bet-hedging executive behavior (they must have fooled the NIH too if it was a scam - although it's very far from being the only vaccine the NIH is helping develop/test).

8: I've been confused, because in Texas they have said that there've been a couple outbreaks specifically tied to daycares, as if daycares had the potential to really be sources of outbreaks.

IIRC, kids in daycare spent a fair amount of time biting each other.

Actually, I'm sure this is the answer, from the link in 8:

Of course, running things this way is expensive. Even after emergency state aid, her YMCA locations ran at a deficit, Corral says.

9: It doesn't need to stay there. Just rotate it on a spit.

If I needed a new roof, that would save time.

The experience with child care centers may not extend to middle and high schools.

The most significant outbreak appeared last week in the Gymnasia Rehavia, a historic middle and high school in Jerusalem. There, 116 students and 14 teachers were infected, according to the Ministry of Education, and the school closed. Built in 1928, its graduates include prominent novelists, politicians and Netanyahu's late brother.

You can't blame them for that. They didn't even know who he was then.

My brother just went to IKEA, bought a bunch of cabinets, and redid his whole kitchen. I'm not that ambitious.

He also redid his whole bathroom, including covering the walls with subway tile. I think maybe his wife did some of that.

For some extremely wholesome content, this dude's dad left him when he was a kid so he's created a YouTube channel called "Dad, how do I?" where he walks you through how to check your car's oil, fix a toilet, what basic tools are, etc.

If his dad had only named him "Sue" he could have taught fighting.

That's a surprising perspective, HB. "No one" is too strong. From my vantage point I see every mainstream publication spending 50% on Covid-19 and 50% on racial issues. Any leftover space is used to attack That Man. I see the NYT and Boston Globe online, and sometimes the WaPo. Lots of stuff out on the webs (Stat, you mentioned). Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline blog is has several good posts a week: very science-y. The Houston Chronicle (in your neck of the woods) had What they don't tell you about surviving Covid-19. Every idiot person in Texas should read it. The BBC had How Covid-19 can damage the brain. The folks the article talked to suggest it's a disease of the brain, not the lungs or heart (of course, they were neurologists). Kevin Drum at MJ is often posting about Covid, and updates a chart of how various countries are doing. Maybe my definition of "mainstream" is different from yours! What are you missing?

One possible explanation of seeing fewer article "updates" is that they would be too embarrassing. I lot people and publications jumped on various bandwagons and positions on what Covid is and how it works that are laughable now (if you can avoid crying). Young people don't get it! Once you've had it you're immune! If you get it it's over quickly! We might be reaching herd immunity via asymptomatic infections! We'll have a vaccine by September! Warm weather will slow the spread!

Maybe writers are getting a bit less likely to jump to conclusions about new studies?

20: It's even more wholesome that he's doing this because of his own experience in foster care and kinship care and with a specific focus on reaching and encouraging unparented young people.

22.2: I'm not sure all of those are "laughable" yet.

In particular "if you get it you're immune". I'm not aware of any cases where someone has definitely contracted COVID twice, and I'd have thought that would have made the news, though maybe I missed it.

And CDC is still saying "It is not yet known whether weather and temperature affect the spread of COVID-19. Some other viruses, like those that cause the common cold and flu, spread more during cold weather months but that does not mean it is impossible to become sick with these viruses during other months. There is much more to learn about the transmissibility, severity, and other features associated with COVID-19 and investigations are ongoing" which is a bit different from "this is a laughable suggestion which only a fool would take seriously".

You point at Lowe, but Lowe's just posted this week about ways in which seroprevalence could be a serious undercount of actual immunity... and the link between that and asymptomatic infection.

22: The BBC article is the kind of thing I'm looking for. The Houston Chronicle article is not different than the type of thing I feel like I read back in April and May. It's a good article and I'm glad they're publishing it, but it's not "what's the latest that we now understand?"

Kevin Drum posts how countries are doing, but not the nature of the disease and what we're learning about it. Like, the other day I went on a quest to try to figure out, as a healthy 42 year old, what is my likelihood of ending up in the hospital if I contract Covid? I gave up without finding anything that had been written since late April.

And Derek Lowe's blog might be good - I am not familiar with it, and definitely wouldn't consider it mainstream.

I'm not aware of any cases where someone has definitely contracted COVID twice, and I'd have thought that would have made the news, though maybe I missed it.

My dad has a certifiable case at his hospital - multiple tests showing negative in between an individual's case back in April, and his re-emergence of symptoms and testing positive again.

They haven't yet run genetic sequencing on the two swabs to determine if it's the same infection that re-emerged or if he was re-infected, but this is an indisputable case of the tests showing clear positive after several clear negatives and a long gap of time.

Also, there is something reassuring about how rare this seems to be, at least.

And CDC is still saying "It is not yet known whether weather and temperature affect the spread of COVID-19. Some other viruses, like those that cause the common cold and flu, spread more during cold weather months but that does not mean it is impossible to become sick with these viruses during other months. There is much more to learn about the transmissibility, severity, and other features associated with COVID-19 and investigations are ongoing" which is a bit different from "this is a laughable suggestion which only a fool would take seriously".

Right. All these pundits on Twitter are going "It now seems obvious: if the virus is supposed to spread less in hot weather, doesn't that mean it spreads more in hot weather because people avoid the hot weather to be inside? How could we have believed weather would be a factor?" OK, well there's a reason we have "flu season" and "cold season" and it's the winter. You'll notice you have dry skin in the winter and dry mucosal membranes that are easier for a virus to get into. The South doesn't have flu season in the summer.

Serious question: how come Florida has a flu season in the winter, then? Just because they get caught in the larger wave?

I have year-round dry skin.

Like, I thought there was something intrinsic to the virus that preferred seasonality, as opposed to how people were more receptive to it in the winter.

Tik-tok explains qualified immunity

I thought it was because of Christmas.

Narnia didn't have the flu and they had always winter, never Christmas.

It seems that the virus also survives better in its droplets in the air when the air is colder and less humid. Here's a summary of some research.

However, in many parts of the world that are actually tropical, humid year-round and don't have a winter (doesn't include any of the United States), they don't have a specific flu season, or if they do it's unpredictable, or may correlate with the period of heaviest rainfall. Don't know why that would be. Lots of information about the seasonality in different places here, in a paper I didn't have time to read.

35 "the virus" means flu, traditionally the major seasonal winter virus.

CDC: Age Nothing but a Number

Coverage of the latest CDC study on Covid risk. Underlying conditions are more important than age. But lots of "buts," too.

I know Derek, you should read his blog.
10- It wasn't quite a typical pump and dump. The executives had already scheduled to sell their shares on the specified date, as required by law- I think they had to decide six months in advance. So what happened was they expedited the data release to pump the shares ahead of the scheduled dump, which meant they could only release part of the data (7/45 patients I think) and there was a question about cherry picking the good results. But as far as I know subsequent data has held up and they used those results to set the protocol for the current phase III study, so it wasn't a complete scam.
Anyway my view is that anyone who has enough shares that they fall under SEC reporting guidelines is a greedy dick if they juice the shares because they're already richer than anyone should be, but it wasn't like they faked data or spread false rumors on day trading chat boards.

He only gave up 1 Yankee run in six innings in game 7 of the 2004 ALCS. That's good enough for me.

(Obviously, I'm the first person in the history of the world to make that "joke.")

For a while there was someone who would comment in everyone one of his threads with some version of that joke.

For some reason Kevin's use of each country's flag as the pattern for the data point markers drives me insane. Maybe it's because each country is graphed separately so the marker colors serve no purpose.

I had never noticed that those were tiny flags.

|| I've long known it was on June 25, 1876, but only just now saw this Dakota name for it: Mila Hanska Wicakastakapi Hehan. |>

You'll have to slow that one down, cowboy.

|| Heebie how is the air in Heebieville? Are you getting Saharan dust? |>

I guess so? Nothing remarkable thus far. It's hazy today, and it's been rainy the last few days and less-hot, and I'm seeing now that "dirty rain" is characteristic of the sand storm. But I wouldn't have noticed anything without being cued by news articles.

It's pretty common to have hazy mornings that burn off in the afternoon, so this afternoon will be more telling if it's a noticeably strange weather pattern. It sounds like it's supposed to peak this afternoon?

Maybe you will get a nice sunset out of it.

I struggle to keep up with scientific literature in the best of times, and I've always liked Derek Lowe for summaries of interesting work, plus I know he's writing reliable coronavirus stuff. I just read the comments (they used to contain some interesting added technical information from specialists and sometimes juicy gossip), and I don't remember them being nearly the cesspit they are now. My goodness, how ugly. So, recommenders of Derek Lowe, you might want to alert readers that the comment section may make them want a shower. I'll be modifying my recommendations from now on to the standard "don't read the comments."

Remember the breathless reports about the first positive trial about remdesivir? Not much coverage about what seems like bigger news, that a widely available and not monopolized steroid led to people with severe illness having much better chance of recovery / speed of recovery.

The latter got a lot of play in the UK, not least because Johnson is desperate for any good news to distract from the government's handling of the situation.

Here's a question I've been wondering:

First, the models all assumed that outbreaks would be symmetric. That was quickly shown to be false, as the decline drags out far slower than the ascent.

So now we have all these real-life trajectories of outbreaks from various countries. Many of them follow this pattern:

1. Explosion.
2. Lockdown, then peak, then slow decline.
3. When the numbers are low enough, gradual reopening.
4. Permanent measures in order to maintain low case numbers: plenty of testing, masks, social distancing, and contact tracing.

In the current southern states, we seem to be skipping steps 2-3, and then modifying 4. We are trying to go:
1. Explosion
4. Masks and social distancing.

So we're not extinguishing the bulk of the cases before implementing moderation - we're hoping that moderation itself can curb the spike.

Is there any evidence of outcomes under this plan? Is this basically the Swedish model?

We've added worse overall health care and only tenuous income support for those at highest risk.

I thought the Southern states' 4 was "Fuck it if Grandma dies. YOLO!"

Also this">https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/604815230149179/">this is insane, if true. Universities in Florida threatening to revoke remote-work arrangements in the fall if you're using it for childcare. Like, you have to prove you have alternate childcare in order to qualify for WFH.

Maybe the 1918 model? Some quarantines and closures, a fair amount of mask requirements, schools opening and closing in waves, spotty adherence longer term and much leas developed medical technology. Two years, four waves, 1/3 population infected, 3-5% of population dead although younger heavily affected unlike now.

ugh, linkfail

53 I think the more accurate rendering is 'fuck it if some person of color's grandma dies . . .'

53, 57: well, maybe my (4) is optimistic. If we eventually achieve 4, does it cause an outbreak to peak and slowly decline?

49. That's a good point. Lowe's blog used to have smart comments (mostly) from smart people who knew the pharma industry. Now, with his writing on Covid, as he has become better known, a trickle of trollish cesspit level commenters has come onto his blog. Sometimes more like a flood. It's sad; I only scan the comments these days.

The best advice is always "don't read the comments," alas.

On topic, I just finished the second afternoon of painting.

I want to make a new CoinStar machine. It's exactly the same as the current ones except instead of the clinking and whirring noises, it goes "One, ah, ah, ah" and so on for each dollar.

||

Surprising new fact: going by Wikipedia, there are now only 2 states where the two houses of the state legislature are not held by the same party, Alaska and Minnesota.

(I was running COVID numbers by who controlled the state government. 36 states are all Dem or all GOP including legislature and governor; 12 have a governor/legislature split. Naturally, the GOP trifectas are seeing the highest and fastest-increasing curve at the moment.)

|>

Oregon's numbers don't look good but it looks like it is a surge of infections in the more rural conservative non-mask wearing parts of the state. The few times I go to the grocery store in my rural part of the state I feel like I am the only person under 80 other than the employees that is wearing a mask. In my county the number of infections has gone from one or two a day to 56 today. I still don't see many people with masks.

There is a big party next door with around 50 people and no one is wearing a mask. Their music is also lousy.

Alaska actually has a Republican numerical majority in both houses, but the Republicans aren't unified enough to form a workable majority in the House so the Dems managed to peel off enough to form a bipartisan majority caucus.

62: Ohio makes m sad, because they ere doing better than MA, but now their cases are ris8 g because people aren't wearing masks. The governor is urging them to, but he won"t order it, because there was a revolt when he did.

Try spending some time in Ohio and you'll have lots more reasons to be sad about it.

62: It's weird - my wife and I went down to the Short North this afternoon and in the stores everyone wore a mask and was trying to maintain social distance, but right next door the Half-Pint Bar was packed, and it could have been the summer of 2019.

68 was supposed to be to 66.

The alcoholics are Republican, is what you're saying?

Is this basically the Swedish model?

Not far off, AFAICS. And that was a howling success, was it not?

But were still basically guessing at everything. Nobody knows if any of the vaccines in trial will work. Nobody knows if having antibodies confers serious immunity and if so how long it will last. Nobody knows what the long term effects of the damn thing are. The policy people are just making shit up.

71: Only for sarcastic uses of the term: https://twitter.com/wwwojtekk/status/1276924018449358848?s=19

It's dramatically worse if you compare it to other Scandinavian countries (but I'm too lazy to find a link).

Are ground-glass opacities something that just means your lungs are inflamed on a CT scan, but you'll heal? Or are ground-glass opacities something physical and glassy in your lungs that reflects permanent damage?

from the other place has freaked me out.

The first unexpected finding is that CAT-scans of the lung showed that two-thirds of those with no clinical signs of Covid-19 had what are called ground-glass opacity abnormalities typical of Covid-19 in at least one lung, and one-third showed ground-glass opacities in both lungs. In simple terms, SARS-CoV-2 is damaging the lungs of the majority who seem symptom-free. The long term health effects of such injuries may be apparent in later life.

I mean, there are lots of things about this that freak me out. But this is today's.

I heard that the other place is full of unreliable information.

73: Yeah, that one freaked me out, too, at first. The journalism here has been a bit irresponsible in explaining what a "ground-glass opacity" is. In patients with TB, ground-glass opacities indicate fluid/lesions in the lungs. The situation there is highly dynamic, and both fluid and lesions (with antibiotic treatment in the case of TB, but even in untreated cases, immune systems will clear some-to-all) generally resolve over time. The finding is concerning, but if it follows the course like TB does, we could see a few things: (1) full resolution, no lasting effects (2) some lung scarring with little or no overall effect to function or (3) in some patients, the immune system walls off the infectious material in a semipermanent lesion which may result in a flare-up later in life or in patients who become immunocompromised (not very common but possible). (3) relies on survival of the infectious material in unusual pH and unusually low oxygen conditions compared to the rest of the lung. As far as I understand it, there is no current evidence that this is happening in COVID-19 patients.

There are other lung diseases that cause the same radiological finding - lung cancer is a common one. But, I don't think we can infer permanent lung damage even in asymptomatic or non-serious cases based on this study.

74. Nature Medicine is usually full of fairly reliable information. On the rare occasions it isnt, they retract it PDQ.

The other place taints everything.

75: Phew. I was trying to read a little bit about GGO and it made it sound like it was usually pre-cancerous, and I couldn't tell if that was because pre-Covid, that was just the general context, or what.

"Ground-glass opacity" has to be one of the worst bedside-manner descriptions yet devised.

Obviously, freaking out grown-ups is bad -- but there's a population of younger folk who seem to think that there's no downside for them getting the 'rona, especially those living in places, like college towns, where they don't know or care about any of the old folks, who could maybe use a little freaking out. I'm not saying that misleading stuff ought to be posted, but if it's true that we don't really know what the long term effects of this are going to be, maybe getting that uncertainty across in a particularly graphic way is defensible.

78: Yeah, I am sure you know this, but CT scans measure density (In Hounsfield units, which run >1000 for bone, 0 for water, and -1000 for air) . Lungs are between water and air, -400 to -600, so anything denser than air shows up as opaque (white) on a scan. These opacities are something that's in between normal lung tissue and water (definitions vary, -300 to -150). Folks with pneumonia, lung cancer, fibrosis, emphysema, and a bunch of other diseases don't show clear CTs. The "ground glass" means that it's not as solid/dense as a tumor but something like fluid or inflammation (or the beginnings of a tumor or calcification or lots of other things).

My prior lab was working on use of CT scans as an early indicator for treatment success or failure, so the folks on that project spent a lot of time looking at different thresholds and definitions, and it was surprising to everyone how dynamic the scans could be, with lesions growing in and disappearing out, pretty different than lung cancer, and not exactly easy to analyze.

Radiologists make a metric fuck-ton of money, and that kind of thing is probably how they justify it.

80: I guess maybe, but as a scientist, I think we lose credibility when we suggest it's likely there will be serious long-term effects on pulmonary health in 2/3 of patients in a disease that has existed for under a year. I also suspect it's true that college kids don't really grasp a lot of potential downsides or long-term risks of their behavior.

Meanwhile, the Blackfeet Nation has closed all of the eastern entrances to Glacier National Park, and yesterday issued an Italian style 14 day full lockdown.

Last I heard, the Park Service was still respecting the Blackfeet position on this -- visitation to Glacier, though, depends significantly on the ability to drive through on the Sun Road, and if people can't, then they go somewhere else. Businesses on both sides will take a hit then, not just those on the east side. Some businesses on the eat side, and within the Blackfeet Nation, are owned by citizens --a whole lot are not, nor are the vast majority of seasonal employees (like me, in 1978). This may well make it easier to sustain, politically.

I'm not exactly sure about the legality: the roads involved are federal, state, and/or county roads, and I don't know whether retained tribal sovereignty let's them close borders. But if some yahoo wants to see if he (it'll be a he) can get Chief Judge Morris to tell the Nation that it has to put elders at risk, well, the yahoo's lawyer should make sure he (it'll be a he) gets paid in advance.

(Would the yahoo mentioned in 84 need to exhaust tribal court remedies first? Why not?)

Woodrow no more.

75, etc. Yes we've just too little information on how this disease works. But what it can do is bad. Some of the stuff hints at vasculature and microvascular effects. So, heart and kidneys at some unknown risk. The recent case of the healthy woman in her 20s who ended up needing a double lung transplant after COVID-19 was shocking. My sister, who normally treats severe TB cases inpatient but whose practice has changed a bit since January, said the picture of the removed lung was terrifying. She usually doesn't use such strong terms.

An X-ray of those lungs before surgery and the picture of that removed lung are in this article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/health/coronavirus-lung-transplant.html

87: Thanks, hadn't seen that one. I am 100% convinced I don't want to get it (or anyone else to get it, either!) and I don't think anyone should be casual about the possibility of long-term effects when we just don't know. I've seen hints of lasting neurological and immunological effects, too. However, I think the odds that we'll see widespread long-term damage are not that big. In my totally uninformed opinion, I suspect it will be like other serious childhood illnesses we have largely eradicated by vaccination: most people get it and recover fully in a normal period, some people have extended convalescence, some have medium-term effects (eg compromised immune function), and a small minority have permanent damage in varying degrees of severity (One in a hundred? One in a thousand?). Science is moving really, really fast on this, but some things are unknowable at this point. The US is giving the world a helluva case study, though.

I just don't think 2/3 of patients are going to have permanent, serious lung damage, which is what the articles about this study are making it sound like.

87.last: I keep being shocked at new findings like this. That is terrifying.

In my totally uninformed opinion, I suspect it will be like other serious childhood illnesses we have largely eradicated by vaccination: most people get it and recover fully in a normal period, some people have extended convalescence, some have medium-term effects (eg compromised immune function), and a small minority have permanent damage in varying degrees of severity (One in a hundred? One in a thousand?).

This, I think, is right. We'll get a demographic transition from post-polio syndrome to post-covid syndrome.

90: there have been millions of confirmed cases. Are there even hundreds of thousands with serious chronic results? No.

One thing I'm not clear about with respect to COVID-19 is whether rare, serious, lingering effects happen reasonably often with other viral infections. Not just things like post-polio syndrome or shingles and chicken pox, but whether seasonal flu has similar effects as COVID-19, or how often walking pneumonia develops. I don't want to be all "but what about the flu?!1?", obviously, but viruses are assholes and it wouldn't surprise me if pretty ordinary viruses occasionally have stupidly bad effects.

I had walking pneumonia as a teen. It was diagnosed when I couldn't breathe one morning, by X-Ray. It took a *long* time for me to get back to normal, and reflecting on it now, it's possible that the long amount of time I thought that I was a lousy endurance athlete and just unusually susceptible to lung infections might have been fallout from whatever virus I had.

How long had you been able to breathe by x-ray before then?

It's like there's a headline for every symptom you have the option to upgrade in that plague game.

They are shutting down on-premises alcohol consumption in Allegheny County. The new cases are from the bars or people who had traveled out of state.

93: you'd be surprised!

OT: Is the pink Brooks Brothers polo shirt the new camo jacket?

In Thailand, it's statues of democracy leaders that are disappearing

|>

Do they want a John Wayne statue? California may have an extra.

Are there even hundreds of thousands with serious chronic results? No.

Is there even good data on this?

91: Yeah, I knew you wouldn't like my off-the-cuff guesses at rates when I wrote it. It's been too short a period to say whether anything is chronic at this point, but among survivors of the 20% of patients hospitalized (about half, I think?), 12% had heart failure, 7% had blood clotting problems. So, approximately 1% had heart failure. Similar to the lung statistic (where 2/3 of patients show inflammation/impairment by CT), 47% of patients with mild and 61% of patients with moderate disease show impaired liver function on tests. I can't find statistics on how many of those cases will resolve, spontaneously or with further treatment, since a lot of these studies are from patients sick in March and April.