Plague Diary

[Doktor Howl]

https://apnews.com/5a70d53a228265269c07a59764382273

Reminds me of a line from Kipling.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
    But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
    An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
    An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

[Doktor Howl]

https://apnews.com/7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — The Trump administration has shelved a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging coronavirus outbreak.

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.

It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The AP obtained a copy from a second federal official who was not authorized to release it. The guidance was described in AP stories last week, prior to the White House decision to shelve it.

More, so much more, at link.

[Faust]

May 20th, up until now I havent known anyone who has caught the virus, my coworkers and social groups adjusted for the social distancing fairly easily (we now just play warhammer fantasy role play online).

Yesterday I found out the partner of my girlfriends sister (who spent Christmas here the last two years) mother caught it and passed away, she was in her fourties. She has been told by the german authorities she cant fly home for the funeral.
I dont know her well, but the situation..  I dont know how to get my head around just how much of a awful mindfuck that must be on top of the grief of losing a parent

[Doktor Howl]

May 20th, up until now I havent known anyone who has caught the virus, my coworkers and social groups adjusted for the social distancing fairly easily (we now just play warhammer fantasy role play online).

Yesterday I found out the partner of my girlfriends sister (who spent Christmas here the last two years) mother caught it and passed away, she was in her fourties. She has been told by the german authorities she cant fly home for the funeral.
I dont know her well, but the situation..  I dont know how to get my head around just how much of a awful mindfuck that must be on top of the grief of losing a parent

Aw, fuck.

[Doktor Howl]

We have 5 confirmed cases at work now. I have been pouring bleach on anything that slows down.

[minuspace]

Where is the zoom?

[The Wizard Joseph]

5/21/2020

I have been through such a strange undulation of my reality lately. it's like things are a rapid boil and all sorts of horrible shit is being brought to the surface. Even as the math picture on the virus gets exponentially worse than the early numbers indicate a ridiculous social movement is springing up calling for "Freedom" instead of the systemic changes that might actually work to buy us time. I have witnessed this first hand through my fool ass brother, but that no longer matters, and I need to wean myself of the habit of calling the wretch "brother" he is not, and probably never was, any such thing. For a couple months it turns out he has been shitting down my back to "dad" and trying to get me out of favor and out of the house. I strongly suspect this is because he's a narcissistic, delusional psycho much like mom and I committed the high crime of contradicting him and calling him out on being deluded, citing actual facts contrary to his psychosis. Dad let him do it, and I also had the displeasure of hearing my goof father airing, falsely,my dirty laundry to some shitneck while on the phone, for no reason other than gossip it seems. i wasn't trying to spy, but i happened to be in earshot and heard my name.

Yesterday my bro tried to coerce me outright and meaningful shit got said. I have made some arrangements with trusties back in LaX for crash space and intend to either get re-settled into the medical system through my connections in LaX or to jump for parts as yet unknown from there. I NEED to get away from my toxic ass fam. I WANT to leave Wisconsin for ever and find a new home state because FUCK WISCONSIN for deciding that drinking and alcohol money were more important than slowing this pandemic. Not sure about the latter, but the former is a done deal in two weeks. In making the decision i feel as if a huge weight literally came off my chest. I'm done with them and their bullshit, and so only have my own to deal with.

[Juana]

Come to California. We're only half way sane but it's better.

May 20th, up until now I havent known anyone who has caught the virus, my coworkers and social groups adjusted for the social distancing fairly easily (we now just play warhammer fantasy role play online).

Yesterday I found out the partner of my girlfriends sister (who spent Christmas here the last two years) mother caught it and passed away, she was in her fourties. She has been told by the german authorities she cant fly home for the funeral.
I dont know her well, but the situation..  I dont know how to get my head around just how much of a awful mindfuck that must be on top of the grief of losing a parent

I'm sorry to hear that. I had a similar situation last month with my grandmother. Her death wasn't COVID-19 related at least, and that your acquitance's was has to add an extra layer of surreal horror.

[The Wizard Joseph]

Come to California. We're only half way sane but it's better.

May 20th, up until now I havent known anyone who has caught the virus, my coworkers and social groups adjusted for the social distancing fairly easily (we now just play warhammer fantasy role play online).

Yesterday I found out the partner of my girlfriends sister (who spent Christmas here the last two years) mother caught it and passed away, she was in her fourties. She has been told by the german authorities she cant fly home for the funeral.
I dont know her well, but the situation..  I dont know how to get my head around just how much of a awful mindfuck that must be on top of the grief of losing a parent

I'm sorry to hear that. I had a similar situation last month with my grandmother. Her death wasn't COVID-19 related at least, and that your acquitance's was has to add an extra layer of surreal horror.

If I have a place to land, and i will hit the ground running, California is a definite possibility. I wanted to get out there in 2015, but things fell through. Definitely a possibility.

[Doktor Howl]

Only now it turns out that the CDC has in fact fucked the dog, and all their testing/contagion numbers are bullshit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/us/politics/coronavirus-tests-cdc.html

So now we don't know what the rate of infection is, just the deaths/population numbers.

[Juana]

Well, let's hope they can disentangle that sooner rather than later. It looks fixable, at least.

[The Wizard Joseph]

There's a paywall, but I think I got the gist. I just want real numbers to look to, but I guess even that is too much for the current systems to do. I am just about to give up trying to track this shit at all. 

[Juana]

There's a paywall, but I think I got the gist. I just want real numbers to look to, but I guess even that is too much for the current systems to do. I am just about to give up trying to track this shit at all. 

I'm a subscriber. You want the article?

[The Wizard Joseph]

There's a paywall, but I think I got the gist. I just want real numbers to look to, but I guess even that is too much for the current systems to do. I am just about to give up trying to track this shit at all. 

I'm a subscriber. You want the article?

Yes please.

[Juana]

C.D.C. Test Counting Error Leaves Epidemiologists ‘Really Baffled’
The Centers for Disease Control has been lumping together tests for active coronavirus with tests for recovered patients, boosting testing totals but muddying the pandemic’s course.

WASHINGTON — As it tracks the coronavirus’s spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from Covid-19 — a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as President Trump boasts about testing.

Now that serology tests, which look for antibodies in the blood of people who have recovered, are more widespread, C.D.C. officials said Friday they would work to separate them from the results of diagnostic tests, which detect active infection. One of the agency’s data tracker websites has been lumping them together.

Stunned epidemiologists say data from antibody tests and active virus tests should never be mixed because diagnostic testing seeks to quantify the amount of active disease in the population. Serological testing can also be unreliable. And patients who have had both diagnostic and serology tests would be counted twice in the totals.

“It just doesn’t make any sense; all of us are really baffled,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.

Epidemiologists, state health officials and a spokeswoman for the C.D.C. said there was no ill intent; they attributed the flawed reporting system to confusion and fatigue in overworked state and local health departments that typically track infections — not tests — during outbreaks. The C.D.C. relies on states to report their data.

If the agency intended to bolster the testing numbers for political purposes, the advantage to Mr. Trump would be minimal. The Atlantic reported that on Monday, one of the C.D.C.’s trackers reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began. On Wednesday, after the C.D.C. stopped differentiating virus tests, the number went to 10.8 million.

A spokeswoman for the C.D.C., Kristen Nordlund, said viral testing was much more common than antibody testing in the pandemic’s early days, and some states combined the virus tests together with the few antibody results they had.

“Now that serology testing is more widely available, C.D.C. is working to differentiate those tests from the viral tests and will report this information, differentiated by test type, publicly on our Covid Data Tracker website in the coming weeks,” Ms. Nordlund said.

State health officials in Virginia, Texas, Georgia and Vermont also said they were beginning to disaggregate their testing data.

“This is not an intentional misuse of information — it’s part of the fog of the infectious disease war,” said Michael T. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota professor and former state epidemiologist who was sharply critical of the disease control centers early in the pandemic. “We’ve done surveillance for cases, and now we’re all trying to do testing, and it presents unique challenges.”

Whatever the reason, the numbers are fueling Mr. Trump’s frequent — and inaccurate — boasts that the United States is doing more testing “than all other countries combined,” a claim that the fact-checking website PolitiFact has declared “pants on fire wrong.” Governors rely on testing in deciding how far to go in reopening their economies. With all 50 states moving to reopen, accurate tracking is essential.

“We’re like the blind epidemiologists trying to understand the elephant,” said Michael Levy, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Health officials, he said, need good reporting to “understand the relationship between the epidemic that we can’t see, and the data that we can see.”

Scott J. Becker, the executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said there was another reason states were tracking testing: Mr. Trump wants the numbers.

“We’ve never needed to capture test volume. That is what the White House wanted to know, how many tests were being done,” Mr. Becker said, adding, “Ordinarily this all works through the public health system, but in this response, there’s been a drive to have data numbers, at multiple levels.”

Like Ms. Nordlund at the C.D.C., health officials around the country say diagnostic tests, which detect the presence of the virus, had initially far outpaced antibody tests, so agencies grouped them together. While both numbers are helpful in assessing the scale of the outbreak, only viral test numbers can indicate a state’s ability to identify people who currently have the virus.

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said mixing the two numbers would distort the picture of the coronavirus outbreak in various parts of the country. In most places outside of New York City, the center of the outbreak in the United States, the proportion of people who have been exposed to the virus, and who would produce a positive result on an antibody test, is likely to be lower than 10 percent.

“What that means is that those tests are more likely to come back negative, which means that you could end up with a misleading picture overall,” he said. “You’ll think there is less disease there than there actually is. That is not something that is going to be helpful, to say the least.”

The mixing of the results was first reported by The Atlantic and local news outlets, like The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Texas Observer, The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and WLRN, a radio station in Miami. Virginia first faced criticism for combining its test results this month, but has since stopped the practice, effective May 14, the state’s health department said on Friday.

Clark Mercer, the chief of staff for Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, a Democrat, initially defended the strategy last week at a news conference, saying that it was important for the state to report totals that included antibody tests in order to be ranked properly compared with other states.

“If we are going to be compared to all 50 states,” he said, “I want to make sure it is apples to apples.”

But a few days later, Mr. Northam, who is a physician, said he had only recently learned that the data was being combined and had since directed the health department to disaggregate the results. Serology, or antibody, tests accounted for 9 percent of tests in Virginia, Mr. Northam said — a figure that Dr. Lilian Peake, the Virginia state epidemiologist, said would not have drastically changed the state’s overall results.

“For the 20 years that I’ve been a public health leader, we’ve never focused on testing, and this is a new virus, so we are still learning about it,” Dr. Peake said Friday. “The tests are being developed, and we are still learning how to interpret them.”

Health officials in Texas also announced this week that they had made changes to exclude antibody tests from its tally of total tests, and Vermont previously removed tests for antibodies from the numbers on its website.

“If we include serology, we inflate the denominator,” Erik W. Filkorn, a spokesman for Vermont’s health operations center, said in a statement on Friday, adding that the effect had been minimal. Serology tests accounted for 4 percent of all tests in Vermont, he said, and including them may have increased the percent positive rate by “a fraction of one percentage point.”

In Georgia, a state that is being closely watched after it became one of the first to reopen businesses last month, officials said they were working to improve transparency after reports that up to 15 percent of the state’s tests were antibody tests. While Georgia’s coronavirus caseload has remained more or less the same in recent weeks, the latest developments raised questions about the accuracy of the numbers.

“The integrity of our data is absolutely our No. 1 priority,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, said at a news conference on Thursday.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health is still using a small number of positive antibody tests to inform the state’s total case numbers, a spokesman, Nate Wardle, said on Friday. But he said those antibody tests were not skewing results — they represent less than 1 percent of total cases in the state, he said — and were not being used to decide whether regions should reopen.

Mr. Wardle said patients who had a positive antibody test as well as symptoms or a high-risk exposure had been included in the state’s “probable” test count, based on guidance from the C.D.C., which allowed the state to track whether patients who had symptoms early on may have had the virus.

“We think the way we are reporting the data is correct,” he said, adding that the probable cause cases were broken out and kept separately from confirmed cases. “We are not using our probable cases in any of our decision-making.”