#seropositive

[life-after-65]

Positive and Negative

I sometimes believe RA patients are divided into two camps. There are those with seropositive disease and there are those with seronegative disease. Those with seropositive disease are treated earlier in their disease. So early that initially hydroxychloroquine might be enough to calm their disease. In order to be diagnosed with RA, seronegative patients must have more severe disease. Once they…

[sleepysadwriter]

Just like me fr

*crouches to go into stealth*

the cracking of my knees alerts the guards, I am immediately killed

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Rob Wallace

From summer into fall, SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, ran up another epidemiological spike just as the feds sunset their pandemic control program.

While the virus continues along a loop of boom and bust repeatedly reset by its capacity for evolutionary escape, putting people in the hospital and out of work at a steady clip, U.S. officials and well-connected epidemiologists have abandoned public health in both practice and concept.

Alongside entrapping millions of Americans in a Long COVID vortex, such dereliction of duty places the U.S. in danger should other diseases arise, including, but not limited to, an avian influenza strain that even now is moving beyond cow herds and poultry flocks and beginning to spread in humans.

The COVID-19 pandemic that some of our most august epidemiologists pretend is over portends a broader decline in the very notion of the public commons upon which any functional society depends.

The State of the COVID Nation What’s the present state of the U.S.’s COVID-19 outbreak?

The National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) reports a large majority of its data set of viral load in sewage plants tracked from September 9 to 23 to be in the orange and red zone of 60 percent or more of all the samples taken nationally since December 2021. That is, all those hot points on the NWSS map tell us the viral load in populations across the U.S. is now as high (and widespread) as any previous COVID peak.

On the other hand, the more acute NWSS measure of changes in SARS-2 sewage loads over the 15 days leading up to September 23 shows a mosaic of declines and increases, indicating differences at the sewershed level we still don’t understand.

NWSS tracks only 1,479 of the 16,000 publicly owned wastewater plants, which together serve at best 80 percent of the U.S. population. So, consider the NWSS map of SARS-CoV-2 loads just a snapshot.

The Walgreens COVID-19 Index of national test positivity covers both rapid tests and the more gold-standard polymerase chain reaction tests little available at this point. As of September 29, we see a decline to 21.8 percent of all tests Walgreens processes nationally from 40 percent earlier in the summer, but still as high as most points in the pandemic. The number of tests remains comparatively high, which at this late date in the pandemic may in itself serve as a measure of incidence. People are getting tested because they’re feeling sick.

There’s a geography to this. For late September, we see increases in test positivity in order of sizes of increase, in New Hampshire, Idaho, Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, among other states, with New York presently hovering at 35.9 percent positive. These numbers were once available down to the county level until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abandoned such mapping.

Syndromic surveillance offers another view of the pandemic. We see from Epic Research hospital reports of ICD-10 codes mapped between August 25 and September 7 for COVID infections per 100,000 hospital tests, states in the South and Appalachia are getting hit relatively hard, with the national hospital positivity rate at 16 percent. Hospitals across the U.S. were once required to report in such incidences on a weekly basis. Now only a few voluntarily report.

With such reporting now blacked out, infectious disease modeler J.P. Weiland is using wastewater data from Biobot Analytics and available CDC seropositivities to project COVID cases per day in the U.S. He reports we were at over 589,000 new COVID infections for the single day of September 19.

This summer’s peak isn’t the 5 million infections a day of the first Omicron wave that Weiland estimated in late 2021, but nearly a million infections a day in early August is well within the range of nearly every other COVID peak so far. COVID isn’t tailing off one peak to the next.

Weiland hasn’t released a detailed methodology, which makes the projection’s validity unconfirmed, although the general gestalt of his time series is probably on point. If these estimates are anywhere close to reality, much more forgiving global and U.S. data should now be rated “junk” and the pandemic considered still at strength — especially, as we previously described, as the virus has been given the public health green light to continue to explore its evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, we see the outbreak stateside continuing to evolve, with a broad mix of 22 sublineages in play, and, as projected September 28, varieties of global variant of concern KP.3 and LB.1 leading the way.

Molecular biologist Raj Rajnarayanan’s 30-day mosaic shows all the genetic sequences of detected sublineages in the U.S. as of September 27, including their geographic origins. We see the near entirety of the country hosting variant JN and its infectious FLiRT offspring, the LBs and KPs 1, 2 and 3. We see the arrival of yet another new lineage, the highly transmissible XEC.

The Real Damage of Long COVID Remains A pandemic’s outcome is a matter of pathogen and host alike. So, while we see the SARS-CoV-2 virus still chugging along, the host population it infects has largely chosen to drop out of the pandemic fight.

While COVID death rates aren’t approaching those of 2020, we are nowhere near a 2019 world as the near entirety of the U.S. establishment pretends. The Swiss Re Institute reports U.S. and U.K. excess mortality rates still at 3 percent and 2.5 percent above pre-pandemic levels.

But here we have both U.S. political parties — and both presidential candidates — placing the ongoing pandemic behind us for good, save for scoring electoral points. The feds are sunsetting bridge funding for COVID antivirals and vaccines, the latter suddenly costing $200 for the uninsured. No wonder, as Science Communications Director Lucky Tran posts, half the Americans in a recent Ipsos poll incredibly expect never to get infected again.

The mass leap away from the reality of a still deadly infection is more from a push from a government that ostensibly holds the monopoly on national health intervention. The U.S. population would likely respond otherwise if signaled so from its elected leadership. Tran reminds us that a 2022 CDC report showed people are more likely to mask when alerted about local outbreaks by public health authorities. Without alerts, on the other hand, Americans are erring on the side of little to no masking.

The resulting health toll continues to beat up the population. Health analyst Mike Hoerger of the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative — whose models for daily COVID incidences typically run hotter than Weiland’s at 669,000 as of September 30 — projects 1 million to 4 million new Long COVID cases coming out of infections this past month alone.

Previous work showed and estimated that between 5 percent and 30 percent of people infected enter the whirlpool of a Long COVID syndrome for which few tests are available for diagnosis, and there are few prophylaxes available or in development to treat current patients.

A Patient-Led Collaborative Group preprint reporting the results of a survey of 3,300 participants found that increasing the number of SARS-CoV-2 infections a person gets increases the risks of Long COVID, worse Long COVID symptoms and greater overall impairment. Reinfections also appear to diminish the protective effects that vaccination may offer against Long COVID. Few of the surveyed reported Long COVID remission.

The damage extends beyond bodily health. The Wall Street Journal, focusing on the professional-managerial class, ran a story headlined “Long Covid Knocked a Million Americans Off Their Career Paths.”

Understandably, the article was widely retweeted by professionals who lamented their previous 60-hour work weeks and personal bests and marked how far they had fallen. Their work ethic proved no prevention against Long COVID’s siege of microclots, brain damage, cognitive collapse and post-exertional malaise that made some unable to get out of bed for weeks.

Long COVID also impacts many on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. A new survey of 7,000-plus adults found low-income Long COVID patients suffered greater food insecurity, especially those who didn’t participate in public food assistance programs.

It isn’t just adults suffering. New research out of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) RECOVER program found similar but distinguishable differences in symptoms between children and adolescents among the 5,300 youth it studied, leading RECOVER to declare Long COVID “a public health crisis” for a population some epidemiologists expediently presented as little affected by the infection.

Acknowledging Failures to Keep Them Going Noting that recent COVID deaths in the U.S. were double those of last spring, this New York Times piece from August took a meta view of the failure to see, observing that we no longer observe: “We Have Largely Moved on From Covid, but Covid Isn’t Done With Us” reads the print edition.

But such a gesture at the gap in reality that the newspaper itself helped condition offers the ruling class that effectively ended the COVID campaign permission to continue to ignore the duly noted failure.

The Times interviewed epidemiologists at the highest professional levels about the gap:

"Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: Covid variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” Covid into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said. Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington earlier this month — a number of whom were over 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask."

And how did officials and the public arrive at such a confusion? After all, other scientists and practitioners standing outside the establishment’s umbrella of respectability debunked the notion that all was well and repeatedly alerted the world to the broader system’s complicit silence.

I wrote in August 2022 that Osterholm himself helped inculcate the confusion:

"Mike Osterholm, who the Times failed to identify as part of the administration’s COVID Advisory Board, converged on this courageous line: “I think [the CDC] are attempting to meet up with the reality that everyone in the public is pretty much done with this pandemic.” A reality the administration worked hard to help manufacture by deft incompetence."

The Times also interviewed epidemiologist Bill Hanage to the effect scientists were themselves confused and that allowed him the freedom of an argument by ex falso quodlibet, a principle from which any proposition can be derived from a contradiction:

"Epidemiologists have long predicted that Covid would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition – a virus that’s around us all the time – and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”"

Ugly sophistry. In actuality, the time series of COVID outbreaks stateside in no way represent the kind of evolutionarily predictable seasonal variants we find in endemic influenza.

And the “socially defined” endemicity to which Hanage alludes was in part of his own making. In one CNN report, we find Hanage alongside Osterholm providing Biden’s CDC cover for dropping recommendations for quarantining at home and testing people without symptoms, brandishing another fallacy:

"Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, agrees that the new guidance shows that the CDC is trying to meet people where they are. “I think that this is a point where you actually have to sort of get real and start giving people tools they can use to do something or not. Because otherwise, people will just not take you seriously,” Hanage said."

An appeal to popularity is no epidemiological principle on which to base a response to a pandemic that’s killed anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5 million Americans.

Public Health Rebellion From Below In other words, Osterholm and Hanage and others aren’t the neutral observers they pretend to be, along with the Times.

Rather, they track disease only up to the point the political class can bear, helping bury the problem when it’s inconvenient. Liberals who are upset that science is met with public distrust might ask whether anyone concerned about outbreaks would listen to these brilliant scientists without suspicions they’re catering to other (well-funded) objectives.

How many times will these “men who stare at vaccines” ask us to run into our epidemiological walls — to reference the George Clooney movie about the Pentagon’s First Earth Battalion — as if our reductionist atoms can just pass through those of SARS-CoV-2, avian influenza, mpox, and the queue of other pathogens emerging out of an alienated nature and expropriated circuits of global production?

Vaccines are always only a part of any public health campaign, and their successful deployment depends on the very nonpharmaceutical interventions and structural changes the feds have insisted we abandon.

Figures of authority across local jurisdictions have similarly blanched. Political leaders — turning now to punishing people who continue to mask — are feeding their own health into the COVID maw held agape by establishment epidemiologists.

The best way to contact the dead in the data, these scientist “seancists” signal, is to help usher a public of biased optimists they’ve cultivated to their graves. The CDC continue to invite Americans “just this way, please,” once again adjusting down its color code scheme for its maps to imply we’re in less danger than we are.

Bipartisan rounds of strategic obfuscation follow each new COVID wave as if set as an algorithm. At this end of the U.S. cycle of accumulation, when capital cashes out and disinvests from the public commons, it’s only such manipulation that’s now endemic.

As the Pandemic ThinkTank described early in the pandemic, abandoned by the feds, we need to pursue a revolt from below. Community groups and local public health departments need to work together to reconstruct our public commons to handle the diseases and other disasters already here or on their way.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

[sleepysadwriter]

This tbh.

“Nothing lasts forever” holds two very different meanings when you’re in a flare vs in remission.

[meret118]

The review includes 78 studies. Only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, so the bulk of the evidence the Cochrane team took into account wasn’t able to tell us much about what was specifically happening during the worst pandemic in a century.

Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing. Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular.

Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers. If telling people to wear masks doesn’t lead to reduced infections, it may be because masks just don’t work, or it could be because people don’t wear masks when they’re told, or aren’t wearing them correctly.

There’s no clear way to distinguish between those possibilities without more original research — which is not what a meta-analysis of existing work can do.

Those studies that did take on Covid and masks directly often painted a different picture than the broader conclusions from the meta-analysis.One of the largest studies of mask-wearing during the Covid pandemic was conducted in Bangladesh, with more than 170,000 people in the intervention group and similar numbers in the control group.

The authors studied a series of public announcements and mask distributions which raised the frequency of mask-wearing. In the end, around 40 percent of the experimental group wore masks, compared to around 10 percent in the control group.

The result, the study found, was a substantial reduction in the share of people with Covid-19-like symptoms, and in antibodies that would suggest a Covid-19 infection: “In surgical mask villages, we observe a 35.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence among individuals ≥60 years old ... We see larger reductions in symptoms and symptomatic seropositivity in villages that experienced larger increases in mask use.”

More at the link.

----

The new paper saying masks don't work is so highly flawed the research is invalid.

[glowinggreenfrog]

A rant on Rheumatoid Arthritis Guidelines

The 2010 ACR/EULAR Rheumatoid Arthritis guidelines need to be changed desperately. It does not reflect the accurate criteria needed for an RA diagnosis and there is so much misinformation on seronegative RA.

There is zero acknowledgment that there are 3 subtypes of RA, and the third requires damage to be taken seriously.

There is clear discrepancy and gaps in research to how RA positive and RA negative patients are treated. No care is taken to differentiate even in research, and the few that are receive such strong pushback and people are getting harmed for this. Granted the discovery is semi-recent, but we cannot wait another 23 years to change the criteria.

I am seronegative, it is absolutely disgusting that the current guidelines are so behind on research. I am angry for myself but other seronegative people and the difficulty we have getting medication. I understand that there isn’t necessarily a clear way to diagnose SNRP, but the guidelines need to reflect that before stage 2 takes place. There needs to at least be an acknowledgment or a name identifying the seronegative version of RA. Type 2 rheumatic disease if you will. I will be a fucking Guinea pig if needed.

Chronic inflammatory poly-arthritis is not a diagnosis, it is a differentiating diagnosis. That is a roadblock, it’s a diagnosis but it’s a fucking roadblock and dismissal. We know TNF blockers are the best for SNRP. Why is sulfasalazine given?That is months to work up to effective medicine and doubt in treatment. A disease presentation will change, but waiting for damage is insane behaviour that is unacceptable if the patient is seropositive and they have the same intensity. It doesn’t matter if seronegative is real or not. It is. That’s not a debate. Exclusion stops research, that’s why the term seronegative exists.

Names matter. Criteria matters.

Why wasn’t my asthma given weight in the criteria? My tendonitis? My neuropathy? My allergies increasing?The pelvic pain I felt? Nerve pain? Muscle weakness? Brain fog?

Nothing at all until I swelled at the right time like a show pony and it wouldn’t stop. That’s pain from September- April to get a functioning diagnosis. Only an access until February to a Rhum, no encouraging from regular doctors to check inflammation markers. I started swelling in December.

I am lucky that an allergy test triggered my RA to progress to inflammation as a presentation and that’s crazy that even that didn’t help me. It is absolutely inhumane.

I am not eligible for NSAIDs or prednisone/steroids but the treatment options I did get were so mild, I am angry. I didn’t get methotrexate, and SNRA diagnosis kept being told to me that it was rare. I could have had the full function of my hands and the time I spent researching, plus my methods of coping be available if I was given priority access to more effective medication as my seropositive counterparts are given. How many more people need to live like that?

Hours of cooking, studying, painting, drawing, seeing friends, living my life all for something that a doctor is told it’s rare, but it’s not.

A bat is a mammal and so is a platypus. A doctor shouldn’t be afraid to call it that because we think mammals can’t fly, have webbed feet and lay eggs. The guidelines have tunnel vision, it hurts research and patients. Rare diseases are only rare because the funding into it is so bad. Think of the lupus guidelines updating, and the rise in psychiatric lupus presentations becoming the norm. The increase in celiac diagnosis. It’s important that this change needs to happen yesterday.

Polar bears have webbed feet. Flying squirrels have wings. It doesn’t mean a mammal is a bird.

It doesn’t mean if you hear hoofs think of horses not zebra’s. As research shows, it means that maybe we don’t actually know what a fucking horse is and you should take the hint that it’s time to redefine it as the research so clearly calls for.

[sn4pe]

"waa waa snape outed remus as a werewolf"

ok i think the reason the fandom reacts to this the way they do is that they think werewolfism is an allegory for being gay (this is why so many hate remus/tonks, and ship remus/sirius) rather than an allegory for hiv - a devastating virus that will kill the patient but which is only spread under very specific conditions. the aids epidemic didn't reach its peak until 2004, and there wasn't even any treatment for slow the progression of hiv to aids until 1997, but it was well known before that time that you couldn't catch hiv just be being around seropositive people - even if bigots acted like you could. THAT is what remus is meant to represent (this was a very important lesson for children to learn at the time the books were being written, i remember having countless assemblies and lessons about hiv in the 90s). the majority of people with hiv are heterosexual, and most are women. only white anti-gay bigots think hiv is a ~gay disease~ and that therefore remus must be gay and any anti-remus character must be homophobic.

it's not "remus is gay and needs to lose his job", it's "remus has hiv and it was fine up until he negligently exposed children to his bodily fluids, so now he needs to lose his job".

(the way this fandom assigns incorrect meanings to very obvious allegories drives me insane. like people thinking house elves are meant to represent slavery when it's very obvious they're meant to represent battered housewives doing constant unthanked and unpaid domestic labour, with everyone ignoring their bruises and injuries, and when someone does try to help they get told off for being a busybody and not minding their own business. like, their liberation movement is the same acronym as the feminist movement! it's so on the nose a child is supposed to be able to pick up on it. and yet this fandom is like "hurr durr it's slavery and you're meant to think hermione is wrong for trying to end it!!!".)

!!!!! this !!!! all this !!!!

[willowreader]

Important study published today investigating why some people develop #LongCovid

The most striking finding is a massive disconnect between the humoral (B-cell) and cellular immune (T-cell) response in Long COVID patients.

In summary, these two systems should work together to take care of the virus: the B-cells attach themselves to viral particles to block the virus from entering the cell, while the T-cells kill cells that get infected.

These two systems are coordinated in the recovered COVID patients but not in the Long COVID patients.

Half of the Long COVID patients who produced coronavirus-specific T-cells produced no antibodies to the virus.

Putting all the pieces together, Long Covid patients present a highly inflammatory state, probably driven by immune dysregulation.

With 3 ongoing big NIH-funded T-cell studies underway (Mark Davis at Stanford, Selin-Gill Harvard, Derya Unutmaz at Jackson labs), T-cells are potentially a big deal in ME/CFS. We need to remain optimistic about it!

[bonesfool]

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was never a time for family. We never went to relatives houses and we never hosted my grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles.

My parents were the only married couple with kids in their friend group. A big part of this was that they both worked in theater, and so many of their friends were queer and in the early 2000s it was difficult for queer people to make their own family, and common that they would be shunned from the one they were already a part of.

So my mom always had our doors open on Thanksgiving to what she called “the strays.” There were a couple of pillars at every Thanksgiving, people who would come every year. But they were always encouraged to bring their friends as well, anyone who didn’t have a place to go to spend the Holiday. We had so many characters across the years. One year we had the designer of a Malibu Barbie come and he and I were both delighted to learn that I had that same Barbie, and we played together after dinner. Another time we had a man who had immigrated from Sri Lanka only a couple months before, and was bewildered but excited to be experiencing an American Holiday.

But maybe the most impactful guest we ever had was a man named Timothy. He was a professionally trained French chef, and he made us a beautiful roast duck that I did not eat because I was four and thought turkey was an ok bird to eat but duck was not. Everyone else loved it of course. Timothy was with us that year because most of his family had disowned him after he came out, and the rest did after he learned he was HIV+.

Before and after dinner I asked him if he would play with me, and he was hesitant to say yes. My family knew of his seropositive status, he felt it was important to disclose it to people before they welcomed him into their homes. He knew that many people would be uncomfortable with an HIV+ man playing with their young child, so he asked my mom’s permission.

She of course said yes, there was nothing about playing with dolls that would transmit the disease, and him having it did not make him an immoral person that could not be trusted around children. This was the first time anyone had expressed that sentiment to him in years, and he broke down into tears. He told my mom that he had always been excited to be in the children of his family’s life and it was so hard to be told he couldn’t. And then we played for the whole evening.

That Christmas when we sent out cards, my mom asked me to make one for him, since he’d played with me and kept me occupied so she could cook.

Early the next year, my parents received this poem/letter in the mail. [Transcript in alt text]

I did not remember much of this story or this day or this man. But my mom told me about him years later, and gave me the poem she had kept for me. Timothy died a couple years ago from complications due to AIDS. I regret that we did not keep in closer contact with him throughout my childhood and I wish I could tell you more about him than this story.

Ever since I learned of his life, and his death, the meaning of Thanksgiving has changed for me. Thanksgiving is not about family, it is about community. It is about providing for those in our vicinity who need it. It’s about mourning those who were not given it. I ask everyone who reads this today to not only grieve our indigenous brothers and sisters, for they certainly deserve the thoughts and attention, but also all of the people left behind by our neoliberal society. Those people abandoned by the nuclear family and the non-existent social safety net. Those who lost their lives as victims to state-sanctioned violence. Please remember your unhoused siblings, your disabled siblings, your undocumented siblings, your refugee siblings. And please open your homes to anyone you know who needs a warm meal in their bellies and a small act of kindness in their hearts.

[eccedeus]

When a government turns its back on its people is it civil war?

No pride month is complete without remembrance of all those who died of AIDS under governmental neglect. Between the 21st and 24th of June 1990, the Amsterdam cultural center Paradiso hosted the Seropositive Ball, which lasted 69 hours and took place at the same time as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference. The following are a number of quotes from the Gran Fury collective presented at the Seropositive Ball.

Source: Paradiso Archive at the International Institute of Social History

[sacredsapling]

For Disability Pride Month, here's another disabled OC: Gabriel!

As a teen, Gabriel had conduct disorder which later developed into ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). He's quite the troublemaker because of this, but ultimately his behavior issues come from trauma. Mainly, abandonment and neglect from his parents who left him with a physically abusive uncle.

Their ASPD also makes them very rebellious and risk-taking, once leading them into a drunk car crash (Gabriel wasn't the driver though) where they broke their collarbone and jaw. It causes minor chronic pain as an adult too.

Gabriel also struggles with alcohol addiction (related to his ASPD and trauma) and is promiscuous. His risk-taking combination of both of these leads him to contract HIV, so his story is also one of living as a chronically ill and immunocompromised person. Not to mention, it's way to rare to see seropositive OCs!

[broadlyepi]

MMWR Booster #21: SARS-CoV-2 Serology and Self-Reported Infection Among Adults — National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, United States, August 2021–May 2022

Top 5 Takeaways

1. 41.6% of adults had antibodies indicating past SARS-CoV-2 infection during August 2021–May 2022, with 43.7% potentially asymptomatic. 2. Seropositivity without vaccination was more common among younger adults, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black adults, and those with less education. 3. The NHANES data suggests disparities in COVID-19 infection rates and vaccination, especially among minority groups. 4. Preliminary NHANES data indicates disparities in seropositivity patterns, with higher infection rates and lower vaccination rates among specific demographic groups. 5. The findings emphasize the need for equity in COVID-19 vaccination efforts, as NHANES data offers more representative insights into asymptomatic infections and vaccination status.

Full summary link: BroadlyEpi.com

Enjoying these summaries? Check back every day at 8am and 4pm Pacific Time (UTC - 8) for a new MMWR Booster. A reblog would also be greatly appreciated, and thanks to everyone who already has! BroadlyEpi hopes to make Epidemiology and Public Health more approachable to anyone who's interested.

[vulpesevanidum]

The River in Winter - Matt Dean

I am completely bewildered by the book I just finished. It was presented as a sort of "learning to love again" literary romance where a man is torn between two very opposite love interests (trite, I know).

However, it turned out that one of them is barely present at all and the other is actually the self-proclaimed counselor of an extra sketchy ex-gay group based out of his home? The main character somewhat inexplicably falls in with the latter almost immediately and spends the majority of the book seriously engaging with an attempt to renounce his homosexuality???

I kept waiting for him to critically assess his situation (or else have someone snap him out of it) but he literally did not come to his senses until the very last page of the very last chapter after the most over-the-top scene possible with the counselor.

Meanwhile, the barely-present opposite interest was setup to exist in the background as some leering, caricaturesque avatar of "degenerate" sexuality. In the penultimate chapter, he finally visits again (after disappearing for 50% of the story), seduces the MC all over again, and then announces that he is seropositive in the middle of unprotected sex with him.

This was all dizzyingly absurd in so many ways. The author includes enough detail to point readers toward where he really stands but I almost couldn't believe it wasn't a kind of Log Cabin Republican fanfiction of a Chick tract at times.

At the very least, it concludes with an epilogue showing that MC has successfully anchored himself to the positive actors in the story again and is back on a good path in life...

[kramlabs]

Nick Hudson: “Epidemic of catastrophic declining standards of medical care”

High levels of seropositivity with no increase in excess deaths

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View the rest of JC on a Bike watching Nick Hudson: