ソーラーバードーのほん: Life in the Convergence Zone

This article on Long Covid is not data yet. Not good data, anyway. But there's some data in it, and that data is bad.

Not on continuing cases. We'll find out shortly if we're going to augur down like so many other places, and I think we will, and big surges will be basically over by March, barring a more substantially new variant that genuinely bypasses vaccine protection against serious acute and long Covid - something which so far has not happened. And here, at least, in Cascadia, where vaccinations rates are high, it'll be a good spring.

But where they aren't. Oh god.

10% of children. And that's a low range. Christ.

I mean, I've talked about this. Repeatedly. I've begged people to come to terms with it and talk about it more and for the love of fuck stop focusing solely on deaths - which are bad! really bad! - and start focusing on long-term effects (like enfeeblement), and it just doesn't stick.

And now it's more or less too late.

I mean, it's not too late. For individuals. Get. Your. Goddamn. Shots. Get your kids their shots. For kids too young to get shots, I don't know what to tell you other than don't send them to school. And get them shot up the instant pediatric doses become available because if these numbers are real, then just fuck me this is what I was afraid of.

This is what I kept warning about.

People have already forgot - and even written off - a million US deaths. Yeah, the official number is less than that, we know from excess deaths that it's much worse than that.

But 10-20% systemic/major organ damage in children.

Fuck.

Vaccines stop Long Covid.

We know this. Symptom rates return to baseline.

And the GOP have turned into an anti-vaccination/pro-disease party that is going to absolutely fuck this country for a generation, even if they all vanished tomorrow.

And if these numbers are right, there's gonna be hell to pay. Once people figure it out, there's gonna be absolute hell, and nothing about it will be rational.

For the love of fuck, get your shots, because this... the aftereffects of this will last decades.

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The war is won. Oasis and the Concordat are at peace. Overwatch has been folded up again, this time made into an intelligence arm for Helix, under new - and the UN hopes better - leadership. The Gods are free - largely - to do as they will.

But the Great Game never ends, not even with victorious Gods - it merely changes. And as the dust settles, old players begin feeling out their new positions - and questioning their old relationships.

Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Dominion
Saga 22: The Undying Spirits
solarbird and bzarcher

Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Dominion is a continuance of The Arc of Conflict, The Arc of Ascension, The Arc of Creation, and In the Beginning, There Was an Armourer and a Living Weapon. To follow the story as it appears, please subscribe to the series.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.

New paper in The Lancet. Read it.

My takeaway of interest: detection rate is down to 5% of cases worldwide. That's an absolutely dramatic decline. You get slightly higher with semi-aggressive testing, but to get legitimately higher, you really have to work at it. A few places are, most places aren't, but let's put speculation to the side as one should and go with numbers we actually know.

Now let's go back to the path to r0 << 1, remind yourself of that if you like.

1,049,560 12-and-over cases remaining/anticipated in Washington State remains a valid number from its date. I'd aimed at 80% resistance from boosters, that was probably a little optimistic, and 70% or less would've been a little more accurate, but let's not change the number now.

5% of 1,049,560 is 52,478. 10% is 104,956. We're doing a lot of testing, let's say we bump it up real high (and that some UW data that isn't strictly about this but is kind of reflective about this) indicating a 10% detection rate. Much higher detection than typical, but we have some fairly aggressive testing here. For, you know, the US.

Two-week average for cases is 14,085/day. Times eight days (since the route to r0 post) gives us 112,680 detected cases, vs. a detection of 104,956.

That should just about compensate for that overly-optimistic 80%.

Now let's throw in some worse numbers for the under-12 set, which wasn't included in the above at all.

Population data says there are 1,044,827 under-12s in Washington State. No way to know how many have already had COVID before the path to r0, so let's assume none. And let's assume 100% case rate and be really on the high side. 10% is 104,482 detections remaining, without reinfection. Given the testing at schools, that might be low, but... we can't know. We're on the tenuous edge of numbers as it is. But despite that, I'm just going to say it:

If these numbers are right, we should be at peak right now.

If I'm right, we're about to be heading down in case count like the wrong kind of rocket but the absolutely right kind of epidemiology.

And as if on cue, the statewide two-week average looks like it has levelled off, and King County - as you'd expect, given our vaccination + booster rate - is already very well past peak.

If these numbers are right, we're done by March, folks. Not even mid-March. Beginning of March.

We. Are. Done. By. March.

Not to zero. But as an epidemic. Barring, as usual, a new and unpredictable variant that resets resistance. Read the Lancet paper, they talk about that, saying that COVID isn't disappearing, but it's about to become the flu.

Get your shots, be ready for occasional outbreaks, but as a true pandemic, here, in Washington State? Assuming all the assumings?

You do have to keep riding this out, but it's all downhill from here. And everybody else is going to be only a couple of months further along.

Barring a vastly new variant...

...it looks like it actually is gonna be a pretty nice spring in Cascadia.

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I've been writing on and off for a long time about how we need to start talking less about COVID deaths and talk more about the long-term effects of COVID on survivors. I'm not alone in that, but I was fairly early out the gate.

The reason I've been talking about this is because neither fascists nor fundamentalists give a fuck about theoretical death, particularly not in the 1% range, particularly not amongst the people they see as "old" or "already ill" or - as was particularly obvious in the early parts of this pandemic - of colour. The fascists want to kill all those people, the fundamentalists see death as just going to be with Jesus, and none of them see any of that as applying to them anyway.

It's never caught on, sadly. I've tried.

But I think part of it is that I've never found the right word.

I might've found it now.

Let's talk about enfeeblement.

I surveyed a lot of papers in late 2020 and early 2021 talking about not just Long COVID, but asymptomatic long-term damage from COVID.

I talk a lot about how 20% or more of asymptomatic COVID cases turn up with major organ damage. I use that number because of all the large-population studies I saw, it was the lowest number. And also because, being the smallest number, I decided it was the one least likely to be rejected out of hand.

Those people are starting to die now. None of it's being called COVID, but it's showing up in excess-death numbers, like that 140% excess-deaths rate reported by insurance companies in January 2022.

These are all people whose long-term health has been weakened.

For some, it's becoming fatal.

For a larger number, it's not fatal - yet - but it's symptomatic, in many different ways, all bad. All weakening. All enfeebling.

Some are far more easily tired than before. Some are weaker. Some get short of breath, sometimes at random. Some have a hard time thinking, or concentrating, and some have memory issues. Some can't smell or taste anymore. Some have blood circulation problems.

Some throw clots and have strokes.

Some do all of the above.

They have all been made one degree or another of feeble. It might be showing up now; it might show up later; it might not even show up at all - though there was a study out last month showing symptoms increasing over time, rather than decreasing. Lives getting worse, not better.

Enfeeblement.

COVID makes you feeble.

As I said just above, fascists and fundamentalists don't care about death. The former want to deal it en masse; the latter seek it out. In their own words, death from COVID-19 is good, and not to be feared.

But enfeeblement?

Oh, they hate the feeble. Loathe them. Despise them. And they fear - existentially fear - becoming one of them.

They are terrified of becoming feeble themselves.

And now, assuming today's study holds up, we know something new.

We, the vaccinated... we might get COVID, sure... but we don't get Long COVID.

Symptoms of Long COVID go to zero.

We don't become feeble from getting COVID... and they do.

You want to strike some fear of god in the fundamentalist, in the fascist?

That's how.

It won't happen to all of 'em. Not even most. But let's say one in five.

Ask them. Present it as a hypothetical. As an "okay, you won't get vaccinated against COVID because it doesn't stop you from getting the disease, but what about this other case?" example.

"So there's a new disease, doesn't kill anybody - well, not much of anybody - but it fucks people up pretty bad. Once it's over, one out of five are tired all the time, get weak, they have breathing problems, can't think right - a lot of them can't concentrate, they forget things constantly. Their immunity gets broken, too, so they get sick again a lot. Long term stuff."

"But there's a vaccine. Doesn't stop you from getting it, but it does stop you from getting fucked up for life."

"Would you get a vaccine against that?"

And of course, modulo the omission of death, I just described COVID-19.

I mean it. They don't care about death. They particularly don't care about the deaths of others. They really do not give a single fuck.

But enfeeblement?

And the unstated but omnipresent backdrop, becoming unworthy by becoming ill?

Yeah. About that, they care. And they already fear it, all the time.

And getting vaccinated is the way out.

Put that to them, and let's see what they say.

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hooooooooly fuck EXTREMELY GOOD COVID NEWS holy fuck

Chise - @sailorrooscout · 11:55 AM · Jan 17, 2022
Does COVID-19 vaccination have a protective effect against Long COVID? Answer: YES.

“Vaccination with at least two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a substantial decrease in reporting the most common post-acute COVID-19 symptoms, bringing it back to baseline.” [THREAD]

Keeping in mind that there are always exceptions and that this is speaking statistically across large numbers, a reasonable-population study just out (and linked in the thread) shows extremely clearly that statistically speaking, breakthrough case patients who had previously received the complete initial course of two-dose vaccination DO NOT GET Long COVID.

Not even the booster. Just the initial two doses.

Again, there will be some exceptions because there always are and there will be, for lots of reasons, including pre-existing immunodeficiency which I am not ignoring, but these numbers are so strong that I'm pretty sure the odds for even worst-case patients are going to be dramatically - dramatically - improved.

Seriously these are some "NOPE! [slams book closed] YOU'RE GOOD!" numbers.

For those of us who have been going on about long-term damage from COVID (including not just Long COVID but the extended systemic bodily damage) this is ... holy fuck this is good news.

Look, in the unvaccinated, omicron still causes Long COVID in large numbers. It still trainwrecks immune systems by fucking T cells. Less so, we think, than previous variants, but even less are still some ugly odds.

But it's not too late to get vaccinated. Half-vaccinated isn't enough, the numbers are really clear on that, you need both shots.

But it's not too late.

Get your shots. For fuck's sake, get your shots.

Because if this holds up against new variants we haven't yet seen so can't speculate about, and if you're fully vaccinated, then that light at the end of the tunnel?

It's actually the end of the tunnel.

And it isn't secretly a train.

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Mehdi Hasan - @mehdirhasan · 1:39 PM · Jan 14, 2022
It begins...

New Virginia Governor Youngkin to Lift School Mask Mandate, Change COVID Policies
Virginia’s next governor, Glenn Youngkin, said he will lift the state’s school mask mandate and change other COVID-19 policies after taking office Jan. 15.

If you vote for the @GOP, you are voting to make the plague worse.

This is what they do.

They are a party literally doing everything in their power to make COVID-19 worse, sabotaging every attempt to control it, at every level.

This is an extension of their general philosophy, that either it's their country to rule, or there'll be no country to rule.

When in power, they loot, funneling money upwards.

When out of power, they sabotage everything in sight.

Even attempts to control a deadly pandemic.

They do this because _it works_. It rewards them with power, because people blame the "ruling party," no matter what the opposition does.

In our system, the opposition can do a lot. When it's acting in good faith, that's fine. Healthy.

When it's acting in _bad_ faith, it's not.

Right now, they're doing everything in their power to sabotage the economy, the right to vote - even working to make COVID worse.

And people ignore all that, blaming those who are at least _trying_ to get this under control.

Exactly as the GOP expect.

That's why they do it.

Because. It. Works.

So every time someone goes, "I'm never voting again!" or "I'm never voting Democratic again," you might hear a little _snap_.

That's another Republican saboteur getting their pitchfork.

"Our Country, or No Country" is why the country is falling apart.

I mean, there are a bunch of other reasons, _obviously_. This shit works because of other reasons, _obviously_, the single biggest one of which is racism, the second biggest one of which is misogyny, and I think they're more neck and neck than a lot of people realise.

It's their out-and-out willingness to go all-in on balls-to-the-wall it's-ours-or-we'll-destroy-it-all bad-faith exploitation of it - to make it worse, not better, and all for power...

_That's_ what's breaking everything apart.

And they know.

And they don't care.

Because if it's not their country, as far as they're concerned, there shouldn't be a country.

See MTG's "national divorce," just for starters.

Most of them don't want to go that far. For one thing, that wouldn't leave them enough "liberals" to "own." But also, it'd hurt the economy in the wrong ways.

They'd rather just destroy democracy, and replace it with a facade where they can't lose power.

Which is, of course, the goal.

So I suppose for the most part it's less "Our Country or No Country," it's more, "Our Democracy, or No Democracy."

Which, really, is about the same thing.

Hungary and Russia are the models. The pretense, but not the reality, of representative government.

And every time you blame the opposition for Republican sabotage, and decide not to vote, or reward them in _any_ way...

...you move it a little further along.

I mean, sure, bitch at Democrats all you want to. Go at 'em. Primary the worst fuckers, absolutely - Manchin, Sinema? Fuck yeah go at. I sure am.

But in the end, put the blame where it most belongs: at the feet of those trying to end the democracy of this republic. The GOP.

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So last week we had a fairly complete run of laundry using the simple heat reclamation/humidity gain prototype.

It wasn't a true full week, because one of our housemates wasn't able to use the laundry during that time, but it was still eight typical loads, which is a reasonable number for a first run.

Temperature:

During these runs, we reclaimed about .8°C per load, on average, outside the laundry. This clearly indicates at least partial distribution to other parts of the house. Temperature sensors on the same floor support this. It's not as distributed as it could be, since the dryer itself is exhausting air, but the positive gain shows that this reclamation produces a neat positive in heat, vs. the net loss caused by the dryer taking air in from the house and expelling it outdoors.

Humidity:

The runs show short-term spikes of 4-5 points of humidity per run at the sensor outside the laundry, which again indicates of which about 2 end up sticky and shared across the building. At no point have we exceeded 60% relative humidity, which is relevant because sustained humidity above that point starts becoming conducive to mould and mildew growth.

(This is why showers have exhaust fans.)

Dust/particulate escape:

None observed, including no atypical buildup of dust. Given that the exhaust vent is a HEPA filter, this is unsurprising, but nice to have confirmed. It does the kind of job you'd want it to in this application, while still allowing for substantial heat and humidity reclamation.

Filter clogging:

One of the several complaints about full indoor venting is the fast rate at which dry filters clog - how quickly depends entirely on the lint content of any set of laundry, but it's a problem no matter what type of loads are being washed. Some reviewers of the most popular indoor dry exhaust filter on Amazon report having to clean the filter in as few as every two or three loads.

Water filters are the more typical solution to this problem, but those require that water be added and/or changed out on a regular basis.

So I was pleasantly surprised in that there was no clogging of the filter, and indeed very little buildup even on the very thin charcoal prefilter. The exceptions were a small number of large particles of lint, clearly aggregated beforehand, probably indicating it's time to clean out the vent pathway in the dryer itself again. This supports my hypothesis that in practical application, providing separate escape for the small fragments which make it past the lint filter does in fact direct most of them that way.

It also demonstrates that even weekly filter cleanings are most likely unnecessary in our case. I will continue to watch the prefilter lint accumulation rate in an attempt to determine how quickly buildup occurs. At this point I have reason to suspect that with our normal loads, a monthly cleanout routine is likely to be adequate, and that at very least, weekly cleanout is entirely unnecessary.

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This is California, not Washington State, but in the context of yesterday's post on r₀<<1, I give you:

California hospitals predict COVID crisis will last until the end of February

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This is an insurance statistics type of calculation, not an epidemiologist type of calculation. All my original science has been genetics and computer science, not virology or epidemiology, and I'm not a source for either here. This is accounting maths, not biology. But given that... it's still a path to r₀<<1.

All data Washington State. All projections based on Washington State numbers. All data is specifically 12-and-over Washington State residents - including population numbers - because under that age is restricted in funny ways and harder to get. For 11-and-unders, I'm going to pretend that you're going to get a similar path, or worse.

But for the purposes of these calculations, by worse, I mean faster.

All of this assumes bad cases in terms of additional vaccination and mitigation measures, intentionally pessimistic assumptions that will be basically correct for Republicans in particular, due to the party's current status as literally pro-plague, but less so for everyone else.

Finally, none of this should be taken as endorsement of what I'm laying out. This is not how we should be doing this, and I mean it, it's really not. Even with omicron, there was no reason any of this had to be this bad, and no reason we had to get where we are. And this path's downside includes the greatest possibility of generating a new and worse strain of mutations.

But now that we are here, we are here, and this is what I think is reasonably enough likely to happen that I'm willing to put it in a post.

In other words, if I had to put down money, this is how I'd put down the money.

Let's go.

73.9% of 12-and-overs have full doses of vaccine out of a population of a 6,529,327.

That leaves 1,704,154 12-and-overs partially or unvaccinated, 1,253,630 of which have no vaccination resistance at all (80.8% have partial vaccination, leaving 19.2%), 450,524 who have partial vaccination and some resistance.

In very crude terms - who am I kidding, this is brutally crude terms - partial vaccination gets you around 40% resistance. Probably lower now with omicron, certainly lower with time, but some (possibly most) of those are recent and will get their second shots. But let's not assume that, and let's call it 30%.

70% of 450,524 gets you 315,367 cases, given everyone fully exposed again.

Full vaccination plus time still gets you around 70% resistance to omicron. Booster takes that higher to a bit above 90%, and we'll round down. Booster uptake here is pretty good amongst those already vaccinated, and some percentage of people have already had COVID and also been vaccinated, which in the right order improves ongoing resistance further. So let's call it 80% resistance. It's kind of a shot in the dark, but it's probably not too wrong.

20% of 5,275,697 gets you 1,055,139 cases.

Of the unvaccinated, with a 100% infection rate, you get 1,704,154 projectable cases.

That's a total of 3,074,660 bad-scenario/bad-behaviour cases moving forward from now.

But.

That leaves out prior cases in and of themselves - as opposed to resistance gained by them, which we have included. We need to include both.

There have been 1,009,187 total cases (all ages) by positive antigen test or better, many (most?) PCR confirmed. This is most certainly a substantial undercount, given 70% asymptomatic, an old number but the estimates I've had. Omicron really does produce a less severe disease overall, from the data I've seen, so it's possible that percentage goes up, not down - but I'll keep it as per historical.

There are 10,203 deaths, also most likely an undercount, from what I've heard by a factor of 1.4. So it's call it 14,284 deaths, and that's far enough below the really... really two-digit accuracy of this wild guestimation festival that I'll set them aside.

Based on the current numbers, about 86% of COVID cases would be 12-and-up. (I can't get that broken up separately from the state dashboard. I imagine there's a way to get it more exactly, but I haven't dug enough to find it.)

86% of 1,009,187 is 867,900 cases in the 12-and-up population.

867,900/.3 gives you 2,893,000 total cases, or 2,025,100 undetected cases. Maybe.

Some of these cases are definitely re-infections, particularly amongst the unvaccinated, which would reduce the number of people, vs. the number of cases. That would lengthen the timeline I'm about to - finally! - describe. But because I have no solid knowledge of those percentages here, I'm leaving that aside.

(I remind you: I said, this is crude.)

We have a projectable 3,074,660 additional cases moving forward, with previous case resistance already factored in, but assuming no undetected cases to date.

And that's not what we have.

3,074,660 - 2,025,100 (estimated undetected) leaves 1,049,560 cases anticipated.

(Yes, possibly more, depending upon reinfection rate of prior cases. But that's data I don't have, so I can't go with it.)

70% of those would historically go undetected, so don't look for that million more in the dashboards. But not being detected isn't really relevant here - what matters is actual cases to come.

(Besides, there'll be a... bad-case 30% reinfection rate amongst the post-omicron unvaccinated if or when delta manages a resurgence, but we'll leave that aside for now. Watch data over the coming weeks in fading hotspots for signs of that.)

So.

1,049,560 cases/12,000 (cases/day) - roughly the last two weeks averaged and frankly too low - leaves you 87 days on this bullet rail of bullshit. Three months.

Mid-April.

1,049,560 cases/15,000 (cases/day) - a little under the last four days averaged - leaves you 70 days. A bit over two months.

Late March.

1,049,560 cases/20,000 (cases/day) - a number we haven't seen yet, but if we spike up - leaves you 52 days. Seven and a half weeks.

Early March.

And whenever it is we get here, be it early March or mid April, all the anti-vaxxers - and, unfortunately, all those who aren't anti-vaccination but who haven't been able to get vaccinated for various good and unfortunate reasons - will have received the shittiest, most dangerous, least effective de facto vaccination available, 70% and falling resistance in exchange for 10% or more with long-term major organ damage, 2-3% with Long Covid, and let's say half a percent dead if the medical system doesn't collapse.

Assuming half the damage of delta.

(Spoiler: the medical system is already near collapse. A lot more people than that will die.)

Funny part is, the worse the anti-vaxxers act, the sharper the case spike. The shaper the case spike, the sooner the case collapse. Not down to zero, but down to actually controllable even with active ongoing active Republican sabotage.

Barring, of course, some kind of New Pandemic/Covid-22 variant that resets the entire clock to zero.

When I said a few posts ago that the heavy-duty phases of this could be over by May, this is what I meant, and basically how I got there.

When I said in comments "and I could mean March," well... all the anti-vaccination/pro-plague people have to do is just keep doubling down on being the massive dicks they've already been and getting omicron once or twice, the sooner, the better. Given their history, I think the odds of that are pretty good.

But if they change their minds (HA!) and start getting vaccinated, en masse, the timeline actually shortens - with less harm to them, and to their collateral damage.

(The way to extend the timeline is to keep not getting vaccinated but at the same time act better to control the plague, adopting masking, and so on. It's a little ironic, in that if they want to keep the plague going to keep the grift going as they have so far, they have to be much less dickish, but not about everything - about specific things in specific ways. I don't think they have the nuance for that. Let's hope they don't prove me wrong.)

And now, here we are.

The light at the end of the tunnel is a train - but it is also, I think, the end of the tunnel.

It's not too late to get vaccinated, and it's not too late to get your booster, and it's not too late to skate over this. Most people can move themselves from the 100% to the 60% to the 10% or even less with varying degrees of ease here.

Get yourself lucky. Get your shots. Dodge the train.

Because if you can, it's looking like after a nasty, nasty winter...

...it might be a pretty good spring in Cascadia.

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We got a visit, finally, from a technician bringing a new modem.

He verified everything I'd reported, started pinging our modem from the corporate side, and when it powered off... he kept getting responses.

Another modem had our modem's fixed IP address.

They hadn't reset it before redeploying it last Thursday.



Obviously, this is infuriating. Fourth major outage since October, this one another five day clusterfuck, ALL caused by Comcast Business, but the _most_ infuriating part has been being ignored, lied to, and told over and over again it was our problem and to talk to my "local IT."

Hands up for the on-site tech, who gave me no bullshit or pushback, who agreed the modem was behaving bizarrely and was speculating about possible problems with the modem when he saw that he could still ping an unplugged device and knew what had happened immediately. Good job.

The _only_ "good job" I can hand out here on their side.

This has been yet another disaster.

Five days down because they didn't reset a modem they redeployed.

Five days of insulting, dismissive, infuriating "support" from Comcast Business, blaming it on us.

Again.

I'm not tagging Comcast Business directly on this because I honestly don't know if they'd blame the on-site tech or some other bullshit. I just don't. Who even knows? They're this horrible to their customers, what are they like to their employees?

So anyway, yeah.

We're back up.

Five days later.

Because Comcast Business fucked us again.

Ziply put in a temporary fibre cable for us today, btw. Wasn't expecting that. It's on the ground, which isn't great, but not where anybody will hit it, so... it's fine.

We should get actual installation on Thursday, then they'll come back later and put in the final cable.

Looking forward to that.

A _lot_.

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