It's beginning to look like the Delta variant somehow evades your body's first line of defense in fighting viral infections, phagocytes.
Viral immunity springs from training specific B-cells and T-cells to search out and destroy a specific virus.

They're your second immune response team.

Your first immune response is phagocytes, which get rid of most illnesses before your B-cells and T-cells even wake up.
In cases where you do need B-cell or T-cell response, the phagocytes should have at least kept the virus in check.
So the immense viral loads being seen, and the notion that much shorter exposures are danger, are both consistent with Delta COVID somehow interfering with or by passing the phagocyte response, allowing it to grow essentially unchecked until B-cells and T-cells can respond.
If this guess is correct (and it is not just me; I've heard medical professionals guessing about the delta variant and immune response) then the vaccine is even more important.

Training B-cells and T-cells is what the vaccine does.
This guess is also consistent with a greater chance of breathrough infections. As I've described in another thread (much to many people's chagrin), vaccines do NOT prevent infection. They provide a fast enough response to prevent any symptoms and (hopefully) shedding.
The greater number of breakthrough infections would happen because your B-cell/T-cell response is working without any help, and because if you haven't seen the infection in a while, your body my take a day to ramp up production again.
Get vaccinated if you're not. Keep on eye on booster news too. I trust Fauci. But I suspect we will eventually hit a point where boosters are widely recommended.
And for completeness, here's my thread that made people angry about vaccines not preventing infections:

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More from @thomasafine

11 Jul
What the fuck @politico?

You just report what these traitors say and don't push back at all?

politico.com/amp/news/2021/…
There were two really close calls where insurrectionists almost got their hands on members of Congress. In the Senate, Officer Goodman drew them away (twice) from a locations where Senators were still escaping, just yards away.
In the other instance, insurrectionists, came to a barricaded door, though which they can see Representatives escaping just down the hall.

There were almost no police defending that hallway.

This is where Ashli Babbitt was the first to attempt to climb through the barricade.
Read 8 tweets
9 Jul
Why can't we charge media outlets or personalities — or politicians for that matter — with reckless endangerment?

I'm asking this seriously.

(Note: IANAL for the rest of this thread.)
We all know the old saw about yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

What about yelling "There is non fire" in a theater that's burning down?
And for those into the deep nuances of the first amendment, purists will say you actually can not pass a law against yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, because that's prior restraint. This is correct.
Read 19 tweets
8 Jul
There are ransomware oligarchs who's "job" is to manage ransomware hackers and make sure they only hit targets that Putin would permit, or explicitly direct them to targets Putin desires. They provide the hackers needed resources and they collect a cut.
The hackers themselves are a mix of those who are greedy and ambitious — let's call them the GRU track — and those who got in too deep and are coerced into serving the oligarch. The latter are the disposable assets that are more likely to end up getting caught.
Those who get caught are unlikely to know the oligarch that was sponsoring them, and anyway would probably prefer prison to what they fear from the oligarchy.
Read 4 tweets
3 Jul
Would tend to agree, *EXCEPT* that prior to this slogan, police reform *always* meant more money for police education. Only after this slogan, did people talk about serious police reforms, like who responds to what kinds of calls to 911.
And I get the harm this does. Really though, it underscores the precarious nature of our current Dem majority:

If we push too hard for progress we could lose the middle, and if we don't push hard enough we could lose the far left.
And all this is happening with democracy hanging by a thread. If we piss off too many dems, far left or centrist, we're screwed.

This is in part because many people remain in denial about democracy hanging from a thread.
Read 5 tweets
28 Jun
The Internet, as it was originally designed, was meant to be decentralized.

As it exists now, it is more and more monolithic proprietary data silos.
Email was designed as a decentralized distribution and storage system. While that same fundamental system exists today, most of us get our email form providers of monolithic service sites, like gmail, with proprietary storage and internal exchange protocols.
The web is the ultimate decentralized service. Yet Google managed to put a monolithic service on top of it (the search engine) that became essential.
Read 8 tweets
24 Jun
How does everyone feel about a group project?

Let's collect every speech and tweet where Trump — or any of his minions — mentioned 1/6 before 1/6.
And it's probably also worth collecting every time Trump said something that was inciting violence. Though this one will go back years.
Feel free to RT this for wider participation. If there's an actual response I'll probably set up a google doc.
Read 5 tweets

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