Here's what people in Wakayama, Japan receive when they test positive and have to isolate. (This is for two kids). In North America, we're all about how people are cool if they shrug it off and keep working.
Correction: that's the kit for *one* of the kids.
Hey, so, if you're thinking "I should comment on the amount of packaging or how it includes processed snacks", instead maybe just don't and then move along. You've very clearly missed the point. Thanks.
I asked what the isolation policy is in Japan.
Positive cases have to isolate for 10 days or until 3 days after all symptoms are gone, whichever is longer. Close contacts have to quarantine for 7 days unless they test negative on a PCR test on the 5th day.
I've let my nephew know his snacks are now famous.
Just a reminder that all this minimizer excitement is based on a preprint study that included a total of 9 kids with hepatitis in Scotland, 8/9 of whom had the allele. And if the hypothesis seems convoluted, well, that's because it is.
Recall that the same usual minimizers dismissed a study (also a preprint) that included records for 5.6 million people and suggested that reinfections are bad. This is how minimizers operate.
The hypothesis might be correct. Great if it is, if it provides a way to help kids. But the hypocrisy and double standards and absolute commitment that COVID not be involved of minimizers is really something to behold.
* Viruses don't automatically or inevitably evolve to become milder. Transmissibility and immune escape can be under strong selection but virulence may not be, especially if there are lots of hosts, transmission is easy, and infectiousness precedes symptoms.
* Herd immunity isn't going to happen when new immune escaping variants evolve continually. This is true for any source of temporary immunity, but vaccination, infection, or hybrid immunity (vaccination + infection).
* Reinfections are not rare and will probably get more common as vaccine immunity wanes and new variants escape immunity.
* They're all "subvariants of Omicron" in name only. Genetically and antigenically, the various "Omicrons" are quite divergent.
* Write more papers in my Evolution: Education and Outreach series, specifically mutation, genetic drift, sexual selection, and multilevel selection theory.
* Maybe some video talks or a podcast or something about basic evolutionary concepts?
This person really wants everyone to see monkeypox -- and even HIV -- to be diseases of men who have sex with men. This framing would have fit in very well in the days of reporting GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) in the early 1980s.
Here's the full take. If 600 out of 14,000 cases showed up among the only group being tested, it must be a gay STI. Again, we've seen this movie before.