«Помните, был такой ковид?».
«Очевидно, что власти не станут раздражать людей новыми ограничениями».
Драган в Телеграме 22.03:
Роспотребнадзор вчера: пора смягчать антиковидные ограничения в школах. Можно больше не закреплять отдельный кабинет для каждого класса, можно отменять зигзагообразную рассадку и дистанцию 1,5 метра между учениками при проведении аттестаций.
Рособрнадзор сегодня: переносим всероссийские проверочные работы в школах с весны на осень «в связи с прогнозируемым развитием эпидемиологической ситуации и сохранением рисков распространения COVID-19». Социальная дистанция и уменьшение контактов по-прежнему актуальны, есть риск новой волны в марте-апреле.
ВПР переносятся по всей стране — в том числе в тех регионах, которые неделю назад отменили масочный режим и сняли практически все ограничения по причине «стабильного улучшения эпидемиологической ситуации».
Как хорошо, что наконец-то вводятся превентивные меры задолго до начала подъёма. В отличие от первой волны омикрона в январе, когда и федералы, и регионы так сильно избегали дистанта и серьёзных ограничений для школьников, несмотря на 12 тысяч занятых педиатрических коек, переполненные детские больницы по всей стране и рекордную заболеваемость ковидом среди детей. Наконец-то мы видим борьбу с эпидемией.
Странный вывод, правда? Любой здравомыслящий покрутил бы пальцем кое-где, а этот чертов ковид-энтузиаст… Все ж знают, что от мер только хуже, а особенно страдают школьники.
Ясно, что он находится или в коме или в очень тяжёлом состоянии под вентилятором.
Иначе бы его хоронили или, если он идёт на поправку, голосовую весточку опубликовали.
Kazus: Клинтонша и Псаки подцепили вирус, их мужья вроде бы нет.
The former secretary of state and presidential candidate is vaccinated and appears to be taking it in stride.
…Clinton also noted former President Bill Clinton "tested negative and is feeling fine." He is currently quarantining while Clinton recovers.
Meanwhile, Clinton said she is open to movie recommendations.
Скромный пересказ:
Клинтон стойко переносит тяготы и лишения мягкие симптомы. Ейный муж не заразился, на карантине. Она принимает советы, чего бы посмотреть на досуге.
The US Food and Drug Administration has expanded the emergency use authorization of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines to allow adults 50 and older to get a second booster as early as four months after their first booster dose of any Covid-19 vaccine.
The move extends the availability of additional boosters to healthy older adults. The FDA had previously allowed additional shots for anyone 12 or older who was severely immune-deficient. This group of people can now receive a three-dose primary series and two boosters for a total of five doses.
There are multiple indicators that the US wave has begun, with 8 states, Puerto Rico, and District of Columbia all with double digit increase in cases over the past 2 weeks, especially concentrated in the Northeast where genomic surveillance shows it to be the first region that has become BA.2 dominant (accounting for > 50% of cases). This is confirmed with SARS-CoV-2 copies via wastewater with increases that are substantial in as many as a third of municipalities where it is monitored, even though there are only about 600 sites throughout the country. Adding to these findings, the US test positivity rate is increasing, having nearly hit 30% in the first Omicron wave and dropped to 2% by mid-March, now starting to climb at 3%. Collectively, this means we’ll have a BA.2 wave but what isn’t at all clear is whether it will be a small “bump” like our Alpha variant wave, localized mainly to Michigan and Minnesota, or substantial like some of the countries in Western Europe.
In the wake of the emergence of viral variants that are able to evade vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, real-world vaccine efficacy has begun to show differences across the two approved mRNA platforms, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273; these findings suggest that subtle variation in immune responses induced by the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines may confer differential protection. Given our emerging appreciation for the importance of additional antibody functions beyond neutralization, we profiled the post-boost binding and functional capacity of humoral immune responses induced by the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines in a cohort of hospital staff. Both vaccines induced robust humoral immune responses to wild-type severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and to variants of concern. However, differences emerged across epitope-specific responses, with higher concentrations of receptor binding domain (RBD)- and N-terminal domain-specific IgA observed in recipients of mRNA-1273. Antibodies eliciting neutrophil phagocytosis and natural killer cell activation were also increased in mRNA-1273 vaccine recipients as compared to BNT162b2 recipients. RBD-specific antibody depletion highlighted the different roles of non-RBD-specific antibody effector functions induced across the mRNA vaccines. These data provide insights into potential differences in protective immunity conferred by these vaccines.
masterd: Общая идея Комаровского прозвучала мельком, по сути в подтексте: что сейчас только начинается эпидемия обычного гриппа, которая продлится месяца полтора... что новый респираторный вирус в этом году просто не успеет стать пандемией за пределами Китая к началу весны когда уровень заболеваемости начнет снижаться.
Комаровский таки рассказал о разработках этнического биооружия.
Быкову простителен снобизм лаконизм, а я на всякий случай:
Украинцы используют название хлеба как шибболет по отношению к русскоязычным (правильно произносить «паляны́ця»). При кажущейся простоте слова человек, привыкший к фонетике и алфавиту русского языка, автоматически выговаривает его с заметным для украинского уха акцентом (обычно произнося «паляни́ца»), причём независимо от того, прочёл ли он его или пытается воспроизвести со слуха.
Шишков, прости Cube2, таки да, это опять Википедия, и о каких русскоязычных идёт речь, неясно. З., небось, справляется.
Почитал не русскую, не английскую Вики, теперь ясно. Мог бы догадаться, да и Быков подсказывал, а я сделал всё ту же ошибку, что «все» делали до начала всего этого - не понял буквально. В Вики даже есть страныця-дизамбиг.
The lockdowns can never end if the Communist Party can’t admit its people will be infected.
What exactly is the function of China’s zero-Covid lockdowns, which individually and cumulatively now are far bigger than even the Wuhan lockdown in early 2020, when the disease was poorly understood, treatments hadn’t been identified, and vaccines were still months away?
The current lockdown in Shanghai and a recently relaxed one in Shenzhen forced 43 million people to remain in their homes and rely on government food deliveries. These were the biggest shutdowns the country has yet tried, aimed at two vital entrepôts of the global economy.
The data China publishes are hard to make sense of. Daily reports indicate upward of 95% of cases discovered in relentless mass testing have been asymptomatic. Of the 130,000 or so cases reported in Shanghai since March 1, 5,000 were said to have been serious enough to require medical treatment. Two people were reported to have died. Government officials say the ratio applies nation-wide. Why lock down for a disease that is so mild?
The puzzle is both nagging and urgent given damage to China’s and the global economy over a disease that is cold-like, not even flu-like, in most cases. One theory, bruited even on Chinese social media, is that the government is bending over backward, whatever the cost, to preserve a zero-Covid talking point that Xi Jinping has adopted as proof of the superiority of Chinese governance.
The alternative explanation is that China’s leaders are still genuinely terrified of a potential healthcare meltdown. Though 90% of citizens have been vaccinated, 40% of 80-year-olds have yet to receive a shot—27 million of the most vulnerable people. In Shanghai, a city of 26 million, if Omicron were to spread as rapidly as it did through some highly vaccinated Western populations, the result might be Covid patients and others dying for want of care in a jammed-up, broken hospital system.
This would shower disgrace on the Chinese Communist Party and Mr. Xi, who, in his eagerness to be the next Mao, has made himself the locus of all responsibility and therefore all blame. And yet the logic is inescapable: At some point the risk must be taken because there’s no other way to escape the zero-Covid trap. Add the fact that vaccine protection wanes, and the question pointedly becomes, “If not now, when?” Is Beijing holding out for the day when 1.4 billion Chinese can be hooked up to a continuous vaccine drip?
By every report, Shanghai healthcare is already strained by a government requirement that anyone testing positive and their close contacts be hospitalized or, more recently, placed in a special quarantine facility staffed with doctors and nurses. Exhausted medics are standing guard over tens of thousands of healthy patients who have nothing to do but share their aggravation on social media.
Another problem has finally begun sneaking out of the corner of Chinese officials’ mouths: 24 months of zero-Covid propaganda has caused millions of Chinese not only to exaggerate Covid’s deadliness, but to be on the edge of panic about potential lockdowns, having heard repeated reports of hunger, missed medical treatments and the inability to bring help to loved ones.
So we’re left with a perplexity. Is China telling us it has failed and cannot succeed at protecting its healthcare system as the West has done, by vaccinating, by shielding the most vulnerable, and so permitting zero Covid to end? Or has the Communist Party trapped itself in a double bind because it made a national trophy out of not allowing transmission to happen and now can never allow transmission to happen as part of a sensible endgame?
Shanghai’s eight-day lockdown recently was extended indefinitely. And then what? Some 26 million people will be as vulnerable as they were when it started. A lesson the West has learned, Omicron will spread even in fully vaccinated and boosted populations, a description that Shanghai may never get closer to fitting than it does right now.
The irony is more than sad, it’s a diagnosis of authoritarian madness. Holding off Covid’s spread for two years while vaccines and treatments were developed should be a great achievement. The trophy should be going on the shelf by now. An appreciative public should be returning to normal life reconciled to a now-tamed new coronavirus.
The sane outcome may be impossible because the regime has caused its zero-Covid ideology to morph into something insane. If transmission must be suppressed and anything else is a defeat, then the Communist Party has set a game for itself in which no victory is possible.
Unable to protest their lock-up any other way, people have taken to venting their anger by yelling out of their apartment windows. Most of their complaints have to do with food. “We have no food to eat,” they scream. “We haven’t eaten in a very long time. We are starving to death.”
One starving lockdowner found a quieter way to protest his growling stomach. He rolled his refrigerator onto his balcony and opened its doors. The inside is completely empty.
Other protests have taken more tragic forms. As they did in Wuhan two years ago, people are once again jumping off the balconies of high-rise apartment buildings. One video circulating in China shows a couple falling to their deaths. The husband was said to be distraught because the lockdown had cost him his business.
Those desperate enough to venture outside in their search for food are hunted down by “Big Whites” — members of the security forces who owe their nickname to the white hazmat suits they wear. Patrolling the streets day and night, the “Big Whites” arrest and jail anyone caught breaking quarantine, who often get beaten in the process.
Those sent to mass quarantine camps for testing positive for COVID have it scarcely better. These makeshift facilities often lack basic necessities. One video from Shanghai’s Nanhui camp shows people fighting over limited supplies of blankets, water and food.
No one, not even small children, is exempted from the quarantine rule. Hundreds of infants and toddlers have been separated from their parents after testing positive. As one grieving mother complained on social media: “I’m so upset … This is inhumane.”
The ruling left it up to individual airlines and local transit agencies to decide what to do, and by late Monday, the nation’s largest airlines had dropped their mask requirements for domestic flights. The Amtrak rail system said passengers and employees would no longer need to wear masks.
Scientists are urging China to look for alternatives to its two homegrown Covid-19 vaccines to tackle its Omicron outbreak, amid mounting concerns about the jabs’ efficacy against the variant.
The country is struggling with two problems as it faces its worst Covid-19 surge since the start of the pandemic: the sluggish take-up of booster doses — authorities said this week that only 57 per cent of people over 60 have been fully vaccinated with three jabs — and homegrown vaccines that are much less effective than foreign-produced jabs.
На этой неделе суд в США отменил обязательные маски в транспорте. Двое знакомых летели в этот момент в самолётах. В одном самолёте пилот объявил об этом в процессе полёта, часть пасажиров радостно сняло маски, часть занервничало. В другом самолёте летел шеф Ю.А. Он сказал, что стюардессы сняли маски, кинули их в проход и начали танцевать.
когда первый раз зашел в магазин без маски в этом году и потом еще несколько раз после этого пока не привык - без маски я себя чувствовал голым.
Привык за полтора года.
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Во дни благополучия пользуйся благом, а во дни несчастья размышляй
