Coronavirus 6: The Plague of Delta

[Coconut Flan]

These are the kinds of charts that anti-vaxxers need to see and comprehend:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Here-s-when-the-Bay-Area-delta-COVID-surge-is-16370982.php

[Smee]

God, this is heartbreaking 

[Smee]

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with under 40s not being eligible for vaccination until 2 weeks ago 😡😡

 

[clueliss]

And lack of intelligence (hey, we here at FJ had figured that out already) just keeps coming in:

 

[Sarcastically spinster]

I'm in a group message with several other medical professionals.  A few have dragged their feet on getting the shot, but almost everyone has gotten on board with doing it now.  

Except one nurse who has gone all in on the Trump train.  Still pushing for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  Believes Trump is still the real president.  Etc.  There's no point arguing with her, but when others have expressed concerns about the vaccine that they want opinions on, then the response is always helpful and educational, and people are sharing data and info about what they're seeing in their hospitals.  (Some of the members are on the tech level, so don't have a strong educational background to evaluate the data, etc., and have questions about misinformation they're seeing online.)

It's unspoken but obvious that nobody on the text thread agrees with her.  And yet every so often she shows up and sends a few texts and nobody feels like telling her that she's just embarrassing herself.  

[Coconut Flan]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/tv-14-israelis-who-got-3rd-shot-later-infected-with-covid-19/

Some people simply won't respond to the vaccine.  My daughter is afraid I'm one of those people.  She said the hospital where she works has a patient who has had 5 doses and still only produces about 20% of the usual antibodies.  

ETA:  My favorite quote of the day:

Quote

Jha noted that healthcare professionals are best equipped to address concerns and questions about coronavirus and the vaccine.

“For any other disease, you would not turn to your political leader for medical advice, right?” he said. “If you had cancer or if you had heart attack, you wouldn't call up your congressman or woman and say, ‘What's the right therapy I should get?’ You should be talking to your doctor. You should be talking to your healthcare provider.”

 

Edited August 10, 2021 by Coconut Flan

[Smash!]

My physiotherapist believes in conspiracy theories 🤦🏽‍♀️ This is why he doesn‘t get the shot. He saw an interview with a so called doctor (Mr. Hockertz for all Germans here) and even tough it was so clear what the aim of this interview was he believed everything. I was positive my boyfriend and I could get him to the point where he gets vaccinated but for every claim we debunk there is a new one. He believes as long as he‘s protecting himself with a surgical mask he won‘t get Covid even tough I told him again and again that he can spread the virus even when presymptomatic.

I‘m worried about Delta and as soon as the cases reach a certain number I won‘t go to him anymore. Which is a pity because he‘s good.

[Someone Out There]

On 8/9/2021 at 7:27 PM, Smee said:

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with under 40s not being eligible for vaccination until 2 weeks ago 😡😡

 

Have you heard about the report where the people most likely to spread it are those 20-39 because they are the most active around the place. i.e. with kids, work, and parents they interact with everyone/across the generations.

I do think that the NSW government wanting to redirect all the Pfizer doses from all around the country to Sydney was a bit short sighted (and when I first heard about it I doubted that any other state or territory would agree).  I also think that redirecting the doses from regional areas is also short sighted.

As an FYI someone on the radio the other day was suggesting that they were expecting Pfizer to open for 30-39 year olds in September, and then 29 and below from October. I'm not sure how realistic that is in NSW with the current outbreak though (ACT and TAS have opened bookings to 30-39 yr olds, I'm not sure on TAS, but in the ACT the 30-39 year olds crashed the system the first day of eligibility, and I would be surprised if there were many spaces available before October).  Personally I live in an area where we are all just really, really surprised that Sydney folks haven't spread it here yet.

[Ozlsn]

21 hours ago, Someone Out There said:

Have you heard about the report where the people most likely to spread it are those 20-39 because they are the most active around the place. i.e. with kids, work, and parents they interact with everyone/across the generations.

I read that and wondered how likely that actually was - I would have guessed the 30-49 age group were more likely to be in that category,  with 20-29 being more likely to spread it because they didn't have kids and were getting out and about more!

21 hours ago, Someone Out There said:

I do think that the NSW government wanting to redirect all the Pfizer doses from all around the country to Sydney was a bit short sighted

"Short sighted" is certainly one term for it. "Spectacularly unpopular outside Sydney" would be another. To quote a friend "No thank you, we do not want to leave our population vulnerable so you can open for business and crow about how much better you're doing than the rest of the country because your vaccination rates are so high when we have no available vaccines."

I hope the new order of Pfizer will be sufficient to meet demand - I have to say I would prefer that they focus on rolling out as many first doses with the vaccines we have and work out the second shots later rather than holding slots in reserve for that. Delaying the second shot doesn't appear to impact response, and more people with at least some immunity seems likely to slow spread more quickly than a much smaller number of people with higher immunity. Since they opened up for under 40s here the vaccine rates have soared - nearly everyone is really sick of this, and just wants at least a chance of a more normal summer.

[Someone Out There]

57 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

"Short sighted" is certainly one term for it. "Spectacularly unpopular outside Sydney" would be another. To quote a friend "No thank you, we do not want to leave our population vulnerable so you can open for business and crow about how much better you're doing than the rest of the country because your vaccination rates are so high when we have no available vaccines."

Oh yup, I would have been pissed with my government if they had agreed.  As it is, from what I understand there has been limited options for Pfizer outside of Sydney (and potentially Wollongong) in NSW until fairly recently as well.

[WiseGirl]

Happy to report my local Wallyworld has their greeter handing out masks to those who dare to come in without one. Greeter is also the size of a bouncer...who works out a lot.

[Audrey2]

42 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

Happy to report my local Wallyworld has their greeter handing out masks to those who dare to come in without one. Greeter is also the size of a bouncer...who works out a lot.

Sadly, I was just at my Wallyworld yesterday and maybe 10% of people were wearing masks. We also are not doing well as a county for vaccine rates even though our state looks good.

[47of74]

 

[Knight of Ni]

Coworker that I mentioned in an earlier post has been admitted to the hospital. I really hope she makes it out ok especially for the sake of her 2 year old daughter.

[CTRLZero]

We are rebuilding a fence, so of course various neighbors stop by to check on our progress.  Yesterday, a neighbor* who we’ve known for 30+ years stopped by.  He started in on the harm vaccines were doing.  My husband, who is usually very patient and willing to listen, said something like, “well, even the former president struggled with COVID-19 and ultimately got vaccinated.”  Our neighbor hadn’t heard that!?!  Apparently, whatever dark corner of the internet he frequents didn’t mention TFG’s infection and hospitalization.  He ran home to check his sources.  🙄

 

*We are very perplexed at this neighbor’s trumpy transformation.  Even his daughters are avoiding him.  Sad.  His wife has a degenerative disease and likely wouldn’t survive the virus.  Sadder.  

[Audrey2]

On a positive note, I am thrilled to see in this article that native American communities are leading other communities in the percentage of the community that is vaccinated. 

Despite obstacles, Native Americans have the nation's highest COVID-19 vaccination rate

https://www.yahoo.com/news/despite-obstacles-native-americans-nations-133030617.html

Spoiler

For the first several months of the pandemic, the residents of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation were spared by their seclusion in the plains of northern Montana. But when the coronavirus finally arrived, it hit hard.

The six-bed hospital was quickly overwhelmed, and dozens of patients had to be airlifted to Billings or beyond.

By December, 10 people had died, most of them venerated elders, devastating the close-knit community of 4,500. Health workers braced for more contagion and death as the winter forced people into close quarters.

“If you get your electricity shut off or you run out of propane and don’t have hot water, you’re going to Grandma’s house to get cleaned up and stay,” said Jessica Windy Boy, who heads the Indian Health Service branch here.

But the worst fears never materialized. Instead, they helped fuel a highly successful vaccination campaign that has pushed life on the reservation back toward normal.

It's not just the Fort Belknap reservation that has managed to protect itself. Experts say Native Americans have a higher vaccination rate than any other major racial or ethnic group.

Those rates are difficult to determine, because many vaccine recipients do not provide their race or ethnicity when they get shots. But more than 100 million have done so. That data — collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — suggest that Native Americans are 24% more likely than whites to be fully vaccinated, 31% more likely than Latinos, 64% more likely than African Americans and 11% more likely than Asian Americans.

Data from several states and counties offer supporting evidence. In Alaska, for example, Native Americans make up 15% of the population but as of April accounted for 22% of vaccine recipients.

"The surprising success of Native Americans is encouraging, and I think it can serve as a model for broader vaccination efforts across the country," said Latoya Hill, a senior analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The rumors, conspiracy theories and bitter politics that have stalled out the national vaccination effort appear to have gained less currency among Indigenous people.

We were extremely aggressive with our vaccination rates very early," said Dr. Loretta Christensen, chief medical officer of the federal Indian Health Service, which provides care to more than half of the country's 5 million Native Americans. "We had that all on board already, certainly before the Delta variant escalated, so then we've kept our cases down."

Her own tribe, the Navajo Nation, the largest in the country, reports that more than 70% of its members over 12 who live on the reservation are fully vaccinated — well above the rate of 59% for the country as a whole.

"This has been just a tremendous effort across all of Indian Country to take care of our people," Christensen said.

::

Native Americans often live far from healthcare facilities. They face some of the worst poverty in the nation. And distrust of federal authorities runs deep.

For many experts — and even many tribal leaders — it was hard to imagine a group that would be more opposed to government-backed vaccines.

“There is going to be pushback to this vaccine,” Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation, told The Times in December.

In a survey last fall — before clinical trial results came out showing vaccines to be safe and effective — only 35% of Indian Health Service field workers said they would "definitely" or "probably" get shots.

But tribal leaders understood that vaccines were the clearest way out of the pandemic. They took to the radio and social media to promote them, warning that elders faced the greatest danger in communities vulnerable due to high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

They reminded people of the damage COVID-19 had already wrought — killing Native Americans at 2½ times the rate of white Americans — as well as of the smallpox epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries that decimated many tribes.

“I framed it in the way that the virus was a monster, just like any other monster that has come to plague the Navajo people and wreak havoc,” Nez explained in an interview this week. “I told them that you’ve got to have armor, and the armor is the vaccine.”

By the end of 2020, as vaccines were becoming available, attitudes were changing.

In a poll of Native Americans by the Urban Indian Health Institute, 75% of respondents said they were willing to get vaccinated. The primary motivation was "a strong sense of responsibility to protect the Native community and preserve cultural ways."

Fort Belknap — a 980-square-mile reservation established in 1869 for two formerly nomadic tribes, the A'aninin and the Nakoda — was the first of Montana’s seven reservations to obtain ultra-cold freezers needed to store the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.

When the first doses arrived on Dec. 16, health workers were swamped with calls from people anxious that shots would run out. A team of nine public health nurses, all raised in the community, took questions on the vaccines by phone and on Facebook Live, assuring everyone that there would be enough.

The centralized structure of the Indian Health Service, often criticized as bureaucratic, allowed the nurses to quickly sort patients by age and find detailed health and contact information.

Tribes that chose to get vaccines from the agency often received them sooner than those that got them from states. Federal officials ditched protocols, letting tribal leaders determine the order of vaccinations.

At Fort Belknap, health workers went first, then essential workers and elders. In an original move, tribal officials also extended eligibility to staff members of nearby schools that enrolled Native children.

“We saved lives doing that,” said Windy Boy, the Indian Health Service executive. “One school off-reservation had a big outbreak in January, after their personnel had one shot on board.”

Aiming to preserve their cultural heritage, nurses also put Native-language speakers ahead in the line. Tribal leaders got shots early to demonstrate that the vaccines were safe.

Nurses drew on credibility from their family ties as they targeted more people to vaccinate. "The patient-nurse relationship is better established because of that trust," said one nurse, Samantha Allen.

Among the 3,500 tribal members age 12 and above who are served by the Indian Health Service at Fort Belknap, 67% are fully vaccinated, according to the agency office in Billings.

The rate in neighboring Phillips County is 40%.

In the reservation's annual Milk River Indian Days parade last month, the public-health nurses were declared grand marshals and waved from a float.

"We put on our ribbon skirts," said Allen, referring to colorful ceremonial attire. "Otherwise we're always in our scrubs."

::

The other day in the dusty town known as Fort Belknap Agency, teenagers buzzed past double-wide trailer homes on an ATV.

Gamblers in masks sidled up to the blackjack tables at the Fort Belknap Casino, which recently reopened after a shutdown of more than a year.

Tourists were shopping again at the Kwik Stop convenience store on U.S. 2. Classes were to resume this month at Aaniiih Nakoda College.

It seemed that the reservation had turned a corner.

But the public-health nurses still had work to do. Some people continued holding out on the vaccine.

Kathleen Adams, who heads the team, travels around the reservation with vaccines in a cooler, offering to inoculate anybody who still needs it.

"I've been asking my cousin and his wife, but they won't budge," she lamented.

Then there were people like Marty Lone Bear and his wife, Brittany Allen, who live in a remote spot on the reservation, 12 miles outside the town of Hays.

A community health worker had been urging them to get shots, but Lone Bear didn't see the rush. His family subsisted on homegrown vegetables and elk that he hunted — and seldom went to town.

"Let's wait it out and see what the vaccines do to everybody else first," he told his wife.

But now they had begun to look for work, and their 3-year-old, Bianca, was set to start preschool. That meant more contact with people, including elders.

So last week they caught a ride to Hays, took their seats inside a small clinic and rolled up their sleeves to join the ranks of the vaccinated.

 

[Coconut Flan]

Delta changed the game.  According to this article due to the high rate of spread and lowered vaccine effectiveness, even if we reached 100% on vaccinations, it wouldn't end COVID.  

That means we really need to ramp up vaccination to do the best we can though.

https://abc7chicago.com/coronavirus-vaccine-efficacy-against-delta-variant-covid-booster-shot-is-pfizer-effective/10949401/

 

[thoughtful]

19 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

“I framed it in the way that the virus was a monster, just like any other monster that has come to plague the Navajo people and wreak havoc,” Nez explained in an interview this week. “I told them that you’ve got to have armor, and the armor is the vaccine.”

And @thoughtful thought "And, RezPrezNez, you were too busy protecting your people, and too kind and professional, to tell Bro Gary to go fuck himself, because he wanted you to let them die, as long as they were "saved" and going to Heaven. But I thought it for you, and will continue to do so!"

[WiseGirl]

JFC, all they have to do is wear a fucking mask and get a shot. This is heartbreaking. 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/13/us/dallas-county-no-pediatric-icu-beds-left/index.html

 

"Dallas County, Texas, there are "zero ICU beds left for children," county judge Clay Jenkins said in a news conference Friday morning.

"That means if your child's in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have Covid and need an ICU bed, we don't have one. Your child will wait for another child to die,"

[FiveAcres]

The ER / ICU crises in many US cities hits too close to home.

A little over two weeks ago, I got an early morning text from a close friend asking me to come to her house and secure her dogs so she could call 911. She had been having breathing difficulties and had been to her PCP two days earlier for a COVID test. The PCP diagnosed something viral and sent her home with a prescription for an inhaler. The Covid-19 test was negative. I woke my partner, told him there was an emergency, and left the house within 90 seconds.

I can't recall a more anxious ten minute drive than the drive to her house that morning. The EMTs were unexpectedly awesome. She is El Paso County and not city of Colorado Springs like us. As soon as they put her on oxygen, her blood oxygen, which had been scarily low to the point we didn't believe the oximeter, started rocketing up. They transported her to the ER which is five minutes from our house, and less than fifteen minutes from her house. Fortunately she was perfectly lucid and oriented so I didn't have to follow her immediately to the hospital. (I am her emergency contact and also hold her medical power of attorney. She has no close family living and is estranged from some some cousins who live locally.) She had a second COVID test which was negative. Imaging found a pulmonary embolism and a second clot in her leg. It took the hospital nearly thirteen hours to find her a room. The doctor wanted her on the floor that is the step-down from ICU. There was an uptick of COVID 19 hospital admission about the time she was admitted, so I wonder if that was the reason for the long delay. Fortunately, she was getting excellent care from the ER staff. It is a recently built hospital and the ER seems to be state-of-the-art for such facilities.

She is back home on oxygen therapy and is doing well. She has gone back to most of her routine with only minimal help. 

[Ozlsn]

@FiveAcres I'm so glad that ended well, that would have been so scary. We are not at the point of no available ICU beds here yet, but elective surgery has been cancelled in NSW, and there are concerns about regional hospitals not having capacity to cope - and the distances to transfer to hospitals with higher capacity cause their own problems. I really, really hope the harder, circuit breaker lockdown announced yesterday for NSW works to control spread - and my heart goes out to everyone there, because it sucks. ACT had it's first case in nearly a year and went into Lock down for a week to trace and test contacts. QLD just came out of lockdown, and Vic is in another week - we had a case at the Royal Children's Hospital, which is possibly the worst exposure site we could have given that kids are unvaccinated at this point, and so many of the ones still attending in person appointments are highly vulnerable. 

The vaccine rollout has at least gotten going a bit better, and National Cabinet has a plan to get above 80% coverage - but there are some gaps (under 16s, regional/remote areas, especially remote Indigenous communities) which haven't been well addressed yet. I went walking for my 2 hour exercise yesterday - the playgrounds were very busy (lovely day) but over 90% of adults were wearing masks unless drinking coffee, which is helpful. The closest exposure sites to me include a service provider which focuses on autistic children, so I'm hoping they are not in person right now. Sigh.

[Smee]

I’m so glad it turned out ok @FiveAcres!

I’m getting seriously tired of hearing how NSW “needs to lock down harder” to control the spread, restrictions aren’t tough enough, if we just copied exactly what Melbourne did this time last year… I get that people from Melbourne suffered massively in that lockdown and what it achieved was incredible, but Delta seems to be a whole new ballgame. Greater Sydney HAS been locked down for over 7 weeks now and the numbers keep climbing. Melbourne itself is in another “snap” lockdown and a week and a half on, numbers not dropping as they’re finding cases popping up that contact tracers hadn’t linked and weren’t in isolation. It’s not lax rules or people failing to follow them that are responsible for how this is going, it’s a bitch of a virus and Australia is now facing the “flatten the curve so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and there’s time to vaccinate” strategy that most of the world has been juggling for the past 18 months. We’ve been lucky so far with low population density, warm climate, compliant people, and early response. But I really think it was only a matter of time before that wasn’t going to be enough.

I can only imagine how devastating this would have been if we WEREN’T locked down now though 😢

[ILoveJellybeans]

My 16 year old is finally getting vaccinated today, now our area has dropped the age limit to 16. Hopefully they will open it up to kids over 12 soon, so I can get my middle child vaccinated too.

[Someone Out There]

17 hours ago, Smee said:

I’m so glad it turned out ok @FiveAcres!

I’m getting seriously tired of hearing how NSW “needs to lock down harder” to control the spread, restrictions aren’t tough enough, if we just copied exactly what Melbourne did this time last year… I get that people from Melbourne suffered massively in that lockdown and what it achieved was incredible, but Delta seems to be a whole new ballgame. Greater Sydney HAS been locked down for over 7 weeks now and the numbers keep climbing. Melbourne itself is in another “snap” lockdown and a week and a half on, numbers not dropping as they’re finding cases popping up that contact tracers hadn’t linked and weren’t in isolation. It’s not lax rules or people failing to follow them that are responsible for how this is going, it’s a bitch of a virus and Australia is now facing the “flatten the curve so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and there’s time to vaccinate” strategy that most of the world has been juggling for the past 18 months. We’ve been lucky so far with low population density, warm climate, compliant people, and early response. But I really think it was only a matter of time before that wasn’t going to be enough.

I can only imagine how devastating this would have been if we WEREN’T locked down now though 😢

To me the issue with the lockdown (and why it was called a mockdown) was how it was initially set up for the first few weeks with 'wishy washy' language.  Personally I have no issues with the waiting 3 weeks before starting the lockdown as they were pursuing a strategy that had worked for them before. After the 3 weeks or so when they found that wasn't working as before they pursued a lockdown type strategy. However they worded it in such a way that there was no proper definition of who could be out or not which caused more cases.  The current lockdown is definitely a lockdown, not a mockdown.

Currently the main issue I have was that they use 'out in the community' with no proper definition of what that looks like or making it feel like people are completely doing the wrong thing when they probably aren't. Most of the people now 'out in the community' are likely to be people dealing with health care, logistics (such as moving food and goods around the place) and other essential jobs rather than people randomly travelling around shopping.

The problem that I would expect most of rural NSW has (and I know that the ACT has) is the people in Sydney deciding to leave it when there is no need for them to (such as the guy who went to Byron).  The people that I talk to in Canberra weren't really surprised when it made it here, realistically we're a 3 hour drive from Sydney and given there are usually about 75k people going back and forth between NSW and ACT border for work and health reasons it is somewhat difficult to police the border just by looking for NSW number plates.

Personally I take issue with Barilaro blaming the ACT for the lockdown in Regional NSW, as how does he think the virus got to the ACT... I also have issues with how NSW announced the lockdown for the rest of NSW as it shows great disrespect to the people who live in those areas, and the dismissive 'Most of NSW' was already in lockdown is also not a good reason.

[adidas]

I was already in lockdown when the Tweet was made (had been for a while), but my parents weren’t. They had 90 minutes to get organised. 

My older son moved back in with us recently to save money for his upcoming wedding and his fiancée has moved in too, so that she can be in our bubble. Lockdown this time is a lot more pleasant (and noisy, and MESSY) than last time when it was just me and our younger son. My husband has even been around a bit more (he’s an essential worker and was sent to one of the regional hospitals during the last lockdown so we didn’t see him for a long time).