⚠️New #COVID19 recommendations amid spike in #DeltaVariant ➡️All Mississippi residents ages 65+ & anyone with chronic conditions, should avoid all indoor mass gatherings **regardless of vaccination status**. Good. Delta is ~4x more severe than old strain🧵 mississippitoday.org/2021/07/09/msd…
2) The rapid rise of Delta variant cases and virus outbreaks combined with the state’s low vaccination rate led the Mississippi Department of Health to release a slew of new COVID-related guidelines on Friday.
3) The new recommendations, which will stay in place through July 26, also include:
📍All unvaccinated Mississippians wear a mask when indoors in public settings.
📍All Mississippians 12 years of age and older get vaccinated.
4) State Health Officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs, said that these were decided on because Mississippians collectively have not done what it takes to protect us all, and wants to give the most vulnerable individuals the best guidance so they can survive Delta surge the state is facing.
5) “At this pace, and given the sort of external dynamics that are in play here, we’re going to remain vulnerable for a long time,” Dobbs said.
6) “I don’t think that we’re going to have some miraculous increase in our vaccination rate over the next few weeks, so people are going to die needlessly.” ⚠️
7) “And so when we look at who our most vulnerable people are, it’s going to be the people 65 and older, or who have chronic medical issues.”
8) Where is the evidence that #Delta is ~4x or more severe than old strain? There’s actually 3 studies. One key study from Singapore Ministry of Health actually found #DeltaVariant to have 4.9x higher odds of oxygen, hospital admission, or death!
9) In this same study, the Singapore researchers found #DeltaVariant to have much higher viral load than other major strains. Thus, the higher severity is indeed very likely. Both lab and epidemiology supports it. This is also likely one reason why Delta is so transmissible too
10) Before i add more studies on #DeltaVariant in this thread 🧵, I want you all to consider that all these countries are more vaccinated than Mississippi and other Southern conservative state. Yet they are still seeing rapid surges. And accompanied by hospitalization ⬆️ in 🏴
11) “2 dozen” countries with **near vertical rise** in #COVID19 cases. Let that sink in. #DeltaVariant is damn serious.
12) We honestly need to mask regardless of vaccination status too. Here is direct proof, again from detailed analysis from Singapore. Lots of transmission events from vaccinated to unvaccinated.
13) Also notice the large number of asymptomatic transmission (many among vaccinated) in the Singapore outbreak analyses. This is why we need to mask - and do more testing in hotspots even when no symptoms. Masking vaccinated is key to stop chains of transmission to unvaxxed.
14) before I hear one more nonsense comment about “vaccines don’t work”, I want to share this ⬇️. Umbrella ☔️ example is best — it does protect you from rain, but not all water. Doesn’t mean umbrella is useless. You should wear a raincoat (mask) and water resistant clothes too.
15) and in this case with surging #DeltaVariant (equal to a violent thunderstorm ⛈ coming in), you need to do all protective measures: vaccinate, wear mask, ventilate, air disinfection, mass test, contact trace, avoid indoor gathering, and shield elderly. #Delta going vertical.
16) And indeed, sick frail older folks who are vaccinated are possibly much more prone to #COVID19 infection after vaccination. A preprint. Though note, it doesn’t mean young people don’t get breakthroughs (just not due to these factors). medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
17) But but but… do these elderly vaccination breakthroughs cases lead to hospitalizations??? …unfortunately—YES. The authors note: “Post-vaccination infection in frail older adults was not entirely benign, with 30 out of 120 (25%) in this group presenting to hospital.” Wow. ⚠️
18) Okay, more good news & bad news from the same study:
📌Semi-good / Semi bad news—vaccines increase the likelihood asymptomatic infections. Good it’s mild, but bad for testing pickup & stopping silent spread!
19) Why is asymptomatic infections so bad even if it’s mild? Because the properties of a silent #COVID19 infection means it’s less likely to be testing identified & less likely to be isolated to stop it. This is why vaccinated people (many asymptomatic) must mask! CDC is wrong!
21) Both WHO and Los Angeles and California Capital all recommend that vaccinated people should mask while #DeltaVariant surging. CDC does not. While I love CDC, the @CDCDirectoris wrong here. CDC much change directions while #DeltaVariant is surging.
22) Even if your country is vaccinated heavily, you’re not immune from #DeltaVariant causing hospitalization and deaths. As reminder, all critical indexes of hospitalizations, ICU ventilation beds, & deaths all rising in England 🏴! Elderly & vulnerable are at high risk.
23) Sobering— “I’m hearing from my ER colleagues what they are facing now is worse than the surge they faced during the winter,” @meganranney said. #DeltaVariant summer winter is coming. wpri.com/health/coronav…
24) Sporting events are also very risky for high risk elderly folks, and those immunocompromised or have chronic diseases. Don’t risk it. Tell your family it’s too risky amid #DeltaVariant surge.
25) #DeltaVariant is more severe damnit! Forgot to add the other two severity studies— UK data from England and Scotland found 2.4x and 2.6x higher risk of hospitalization than #alphavariant, which is already 64% more severe than older. Thus 1.64*2.5x = Delta is 4x more severe!⚠️
26) Don’t believe me? Just read the exact report from UK govt scientists on #DeltaVariant severity…. The ~2.5x more severe than Alpha / ergo 4x more severe than older strains, is on par with Singapore data of ~4.9x more severe (see post #8 above).
27) we need to shield unvaccinated kids too… 7 kids in the ICU in one small state like Mississippi means countless at risk nationwide while #DeltaVariant surges.
JUST IN— W.H.O. Declares Global Emergency Over New Mpox Outbreak. The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15. The outbreak has spread through 13 countries in Africa, including a few that had never reported mpox cases before.
2) public health emergency of international concern— Also known as PHEIC, this is a status given by WHO to “extraordinary events” that pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease.
3) The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared the outbreak a public health emergency of continental security the day before — the first such declaration by the agency since its inception in 2017.
Concerning—CDC now says that 42 states are seeing rising rates of #COVID19 again—with levels high or very high in 35 states (and rising). COVID wastewater levels have already surpassed last summer’s peak and climbing fast. #CovidIsNotOver cdc.gov/forecast-outbr…
2) Substantial 28% increase in one week. Question is how high it will go. It’s a new variant (mostly KP2 and KP3 and JN1), which are evasive against past infection and past vaccines.
A girl using cover name JANE DOE testified under oath at Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial that she was introduced to Trump by Jeffrey Epstein when she was 14 years old. Pass it on.
Trump’s name appears 7 times in Epstein’s latest files. They regularly called each other according to phone logs. Trump says Epstein is a “terrific guy”. And he traveled on flights, according to logs, to Epstein’s island multiple times.
3) THIS STUFF IS NEW—not old Epstein-Trump info. New information regarding Epstein's child trafficking activities was released 7/2/24. Documents from 2016 are now out of date and do not show the depth of Trump's dealings with Epstein... READ MORE:
Reminder—Trump had expressed executing people on many occasions while President, according to his own Attorney General. Now the Supreme Court has green lit any official act with full presidential immunity. Germany did the same in 1933. It turned out great.
2) If we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it. How Germany became Nazi Germany in 1933….
📍 The New York Times Is Failing Its Readers Badly on Covid
📌“Example of ‘science opinion’ run amok in the [NY Times] is a piece… by Zeynep Tufekci, a commentator with no training in biological science or epidemiology… ➡️Tufekci plays into the hands of the anti-science politicians who now seek vengeance on the flimsiest of grounds.”
2) “Tufekci also adds to the ongoing pile-on about whether the directive to maintain a distance of six feet from others was needed. Although the precise distance was indeed somewhat arbitrary, there was no possibility of obtaining hard data in the relevant time frame. The six-foot distance was a reasonable assumption based on public health history, and the practice of social distancing for other respiratory pathogens, particularly those spread by droplets. It was also adopted in multiple other countries, for the same reasons.”
3) “The problem here isn’t that Tufekci is questioning the evidentiary basis of the six-foot rule—science and public health cannot progress if we don’t evaluate the results of our work. But that progress is more effective when grounded in good-faith inquiry, rather than the kinds of attacks Tufekci levels against government scientists for doing their best in desperate circumstances. This only serves to bolster the forces who seek to destroy the US public health infrastructure, not make it better.
Tufekci also leaves the impression that she alone realized SARS-CoV-2 was airborne early on. In fact, the debate about transmission was fast and furious within the scientific community at that time”