The numbers are still, grim. The 14-day change in cases is +148%, although that is down by three percentage points from the July 29 iteration. Average daily cases in the last seven days are 78,357, wiping out nearly all the president's efforts. Not since February 16 have cases been higher. Hospitalizations are up +73%, a week's daily average of 40,626. They were last higher May 4, substantially more recent than cases. Reasonable to think that the vaccines took the punch out of the virus. Deaths are +13, up from 301 July 30 to 308, but down from July 28th and 29th. The deaths graph looks totally differently from c's and h's, it looks mournful, which is joyful. H's mostly have increased according to their two-three week schedule from infection. The train has not quite made its full length past Death Station, however. The C-D interval is three-four weeks. Cases had just about bottomed out at 12,541 on June 30 and three weeks ago they were at 17,983,on the clear ascent but had just starting. When the 50k and 60k and 70k of more recent days work their way through, deaths gonna rise!
Saturday, July 31, 2021
COVID-19 BIDEN+192 (JULY 31)
POJO finally hit his vaccination target, 70%. Now, he had hoped to hit it by July 4 so he's almost one month late but, you gotta be proud of the three slave states for finally stepping up.
AWESOME News
- Data from the C.D.C. shows that many people in states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri are now receiving their first doses. On Friday, more than 850,000 total shots were recorded in the U.S.
Florida breaks record with more
than 21,000 new COVID cases
Yeah, well our governor is intellectocompromised due to a bone in his brain. How ya doin' Ron?
233 staff members at 2 San Francisco
hospitals have tested positive, most in
breakthrough Delta infections.
Permission to stereotype. Granted.
CDC's third caveat in their report is,
Third, demographics of cases likely reflect those of attendees at the public gatherings, as events were marketed to adult male participants; further study is underway to identify other population characteristics among cases, such as additional demographic characteristics and underlying health conditions including immunocompromising conditions.
Oh my goodness CDC, you're missing the "quirky" characteristic you frigging knuckleheads! Did you really not know?
From Chief WaPo
The [slide presentation] includes CDC data from studies showing that the vaccines are not as effective in immunocompromised patients and nursing home residents, raising the possibility that some at-risk individuals will need an additional vaccine dose.
In the Age of Covid, that's the immunocompromised association I made--nursing homes, the elderly, cancer survivors--not Gays! Lol.
The sub-lede to this article is,
Provincetown, Mass., the quirky community at the tip of
Cape Cod, thought it was safe to return to prepandemic partying.
It wasn’t.
PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — By the Fourth of July, Provincetown’s tourist season had built to a prepandemic thrum. Restaurants were booked solid, and snaking lines formed outside the dance clubs. There were conga lines, drag brunches and a pervasive, joyous sense of relief.
On the weekend of July 4, it was also crowded. Around 60,000 people had jammed into a narrow spit of land, where many congregated, maskless, on sweaty dance floors and at house parties.
PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — By the Fourth of July, Provincetown’s tourist season had built to a prepandemic thrum. Restaurants were booked solid, and snaking lines formed outside the dance clubs. There were conga lines, drag brunches and a pervasive, joyous sense of relief.
...
...visitors were arriving in Provincetown in waves...
...
“We really thought we had beat Covid,” said Alex Morse, who arrived this spring as town manager. “We had internalized those messages, that life will be back to normal. We beat this. We are the most vaccinated community in the state.”
Mr. Morse didn’t think much of it, five days after the holiday, when the town’s Board of Health logged two new cases of coronavirus. A week later, though, the cluster of cases associated with gatherings in Provincetown was growing by 50 to 100 cases per day. Alongside the numbers was an unsettling fact: Most of the people testing.
...
A community of health-conscious, left-leaning Northeasterners, known as a vacation mecca for gay men, Provincetown had one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, upward of 95 percent among permanent residents, Mr. Morse estimates.
“We really thought we had beat Covid,” said Alex Morse, who arrived this spring as town manager. “We had internalized those messages, that life will be back to normal. We beat this. We are the most vaccinated community in the state.”
Mr. Morse didn’t think much of it, five days after the holiday, when the town’s Board of Health logged two new cases of coronavirus. A week later, though, the cluster of cases associated with gatherings in Provincetown was growing by 50 to 100 cases per day. Alongside the numbers was an unsettling fact: Most of the people testing.
...
A community of health-conscious, left-leaning Northeasterners, known as a vacation mecca for gay men, Provincetown had one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, upward of 95 percent among permanent residents, Mr. Morse estimates.
And that is when it hit me. I asked in a previous post if there was reason to view the Provincetown-Barnstable County data as aberrational? Quirky? I didn't make the association. I remembered reading in an article yesterday that people were "jetting" into Provincetown from all over the country for its 4th of July celebration. I didn't make the association. One of those hospitalized was 40. That drew an "Oomph" from me. I remembered reading "immunodeficient" in the CDC report. I didn't make the association with either.
I don't know Provincetown, didn't know it when I read that, didn't have any idea why people were jetting into Provincetown for the 4th of July. But this article makes explicit that Provincetown is "quirky" , aberrational, in being a "gay mecca". There is a reason why this New York Times reporter makes the Provincetown-gay association explicit. Are gay men overrepresented among the immunodeficient? I don't know for sure but AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The CDC article clearly linked immunodeficient and Delta.
With "gay mecca" I made the association. And then I remembered. The vector for AIDS in the United States was gay men jetting into New York City from all over the country to party on July 4, 1976. "Dreamy," in Randy Shilts description, Gaetan Degas, an Air Canada flight attendant, jetted all over North America--Toronto, San Francisco, New York--spreading what was then known as "gay bowel syndrome" all over the continent, even as the Kaposi's sarcoma purple blotches disfigured his face.
Is this why the Provincetown-Barnstable County outbreak stands out from other studies? Why there seems almost an inverse proportion of fully vaxxed and infection? To me, a non-scientist, yes. There is a particular vulnerability that gay men, even fully vaxed gay men, have that makes the CDC report aberrational.
On the weekend of July 4, it was also crowded. Around 60,000 people had jammed into a narrow spit of land, where many congregated, maskless, on sweaty dance floors and at house parties.
...
So many gay men poured in for Circuit Party week, the first week of July, that people on social media started sharing photos of the lines outside clubs, snaking for blocks.
...
From the 965 cases that scientists have traced to gatherings in Provincetown, among them 238 residents
...
“We were told, ‘Now you’re vaccinated, and everyone is vaccinated, you can go out and live the pre-Covid lifestyle. People did, they were living with gusto. We were led to believe, ‘If you get the vaccine, you can go to a dance club, you can go to a house party and meet someone and make out.’ That’s what we thought the situation was.”-Steve Katsurinis, the chair of the town Board of Health
...
From the 965 cases that scientists have traced to gatherings in Provincetown, among them 238 residents
...
“We were told, ‘Now you’re vaccinated, and everyone is vaccinated, you can go out and live the pre-Covid lifestyle. People did, they were living with gusto. We were led to believe, ‘If you get the vaccine, you can go to a dance club, you can go to a house party and meet someone and make out.’ That’s what we thought the situation was.”-Steve Katsurinis, the chair of the town Board of Health
And Mr. Katsurinis heard right! That's what we were told, from the president to the CDC director on down.
By the end of the week, Mr. Katsurinis was taking reports of positive coronavirus cases — all gay men, with an average age of 30 to 35.
What puzzled him, he said, was that so many of the infected people were vaccinated.
“I couldn’t believe, frankly, that vaccinated people were getting and spreading it, the way that the contact tracing people were saying,” he said. “I had that moment of saying, ‘I don’t believe that data is accurate.’”
Days passed, he said, before it was clear that the virus circulating was the Delta variant, “and I went, oh, OK. Delta is a different thing.”
“I don’t think we could have anticipated what Delta would do here,” he said.
Infectious disease specialists have praised the community’s meticulous contact tracing...
Mr. Morse said he was concerned about overreacting...But successive waves of tests showed a rising positivity rate, hitting a peak of 15 percent on July 15...The town’s positivity rate dropped to 4.6 percent on Thursday; its mask mandate will automatically become an advisory, and then be lifted, if it remains low.
Rick Murray, the general manager of the Crown and Anchor, a beachside inn that houses bars and nightclubs, said it is part of the community’s DNA to be “very, very responsible” in a health crisis.
“When the AIDS epidemic came, we took care of our own, and we will take care of our own now,” said Mr. Murray, who has been H.I.V. positive for 37 years. He said he anticipates that guarding against the virus will be challenging “for another two or three years, easily.”
Thinking back to the exuberant crowds of June, [Liz Carney, 500 said it was “a bit naïve” to think it was safe to congregate inside — but also, she misses them.
“There was just a joy and an exhilaration,” she said. “It was very exciting. I wish I had taken a twirl on the dance floor while I had a chance.”
By the end of the week, Mr. Katsurinis was taking reports of positive coronavirus cases — all gay men, with an average age of 30 to 35.
What puzzled him, he said, was that so many of the infected people were vaccinated.
“I couldn’t believe, frankly, that vaccinated people were getting and spreading it, the way that the contact tracing people were saying,” he said. “I had that moment of saying, ‘I don’t believe that data is accurate.’”
Days passed, he said, before it was clear that the virus circulating was the Delta variant, “and I went, oh, OK. Delta is a different thing.”
“I don’t think we could have anticipated what Delta would do here,” he said.
Infectious disease specialists have praised the community’s meticulous contact tracing...
Mr. Morse said he was concerned about overreacting...But successive waves of tests showed a rising positivity rate, hitting a peak of 15 percent on July 15...The town’s positivity rate dropped to 4.6 percent on Thursday; its mask mandate will automatically become an advisory, and then be lifted, if it remains low.
Rick Murray, the general manager of the Crown and Anchor, a beachside inn that houses bars and nightclubs, said it is part of the community’s DNA to be “very, very responsible” in a health crisis.
“When the AIDS epidemic came, we took care of our own, and we will take care of our own now,” said Mr. Murray, who has been H.I.V. positive for 37 years. He said he anticipates that guarding against the virus will be challenging “for another two or three years, easily.”
Thinking back to the exuberant crowds of June, [Liz Carney, 500 said it was “a bit naïve” to think it was safe to congregate inside — but also, she misses them.
“There was just a joy and an exhilaration,” she said. “It was very exciting. I wish I had taken a twirl on the dance floor while I had a chance.”
And the Band Played On.
As patients stream into a Covid
I.C.U. in Florida, hopes fade.
MIAMI — The resurgence of the coronavirus has burdened hospitals anew across the country, with a rush of patients fueled by the virus’s virulent Delta variant catching doctors off guard. Florida has reported the highest daily average hospitalizations in the nation, 36 for every 100,000 people over the past two weeks...
Health workers...at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, feel disbelief that they must endure another surge.
...
Jackson, Florida’s largest public hospital, had 232 Covid-19 patients on Friday, still half the 485 it had on July 27, 2020, its pandemic peak. But a sharp rise in recent hospitalizations prompted administrators to limit visitors and warn that more stringent measures could soon be necessary.
‘The war has changed.’ In just days,
the U.S. shifts tactics against the virus.
What a difference a week makes.
...
“This virus is in the driver’s seat and we are chasing it,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and former C.D.C. scientist.
It was a sharp turnaround from the national mood in early July, when President Biden had promised Americans that a more normal life would resume in time for Independence Day parties, describing the holiday as the start of a “summer of freedom.” Instead, in one episode in Provincetown, Mass., an outbreak that began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities has grown to more than 880 cases — almost three-quarters of them among fully vaccinated people.
It is just one episode, one episode chosen by CDC for one study because of its prominence, the levels of full vaccination among victims and in the state, and the availability of good, hard data. I wondered about this last night: Is there reason to doubt generalizing from this "one episode"? CDC did not think so. "In just days" they shifted from vaccinations as their "most important strategy" to coequals, vax and masks. Is there reason to believe this one episode is aberrational? The infection rates among the fully vaccinated in Provincetown (Barnstable County) were truly astonishing to scientists and laypeople alike. Every other study has found the vaccines are extraordinarily efficacious in preventing 1) infection 2) hospitalization ("serious illness") and, 3) death from COVID-19 and only slightly less effective against the Delta variant. Yet, you can't prove that by the data from Provincetown-Barnstable County. In fact, that data proves pretty near the opposite: more, both in raw numbers and as a percentage, of infections among the fully vaccinated than in the "other" category. "Similar" viral loads; more hospitalizations (albeit with a very small, perhaps unreliable sample size). Staying firmly in our lane and dispensing with the "less" and "more", we encounter this solid bedrock from Provincetown-Barnstable County data:
It does not follow from the data on this one outbreak that vaccination is an efficacious strategy against Delta
The CDC paper on Provincetown-Barnstable County acnowledges that bedrock:...data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak.
CDC continues to recommend full vaccination. OF COURSE! THEY SHOULD! That is the science-based reasonable, responsible thing to do. But that does not explain away the Provincetown-Barnstable County data. I am haunted by that data, haunted by the thought, voiced here by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
"...they [CDC] do not appear to be candid about the extent to which breakthroughs are yielding hospitalizations.”
Haunted by the once-confidential slide presentation:
One of the slides ...estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.
Haunted by this being framed as a "communications" problem.
Improving communications around vaccine breakthrough and vaccine effectiveness
Here is a link to the full, once confidential, CDC slide presentation.
These are two charts I have pulled from the presentation. By definition I am taking them out of context. The first below is a screenshot for emphasis of a slide referred to in one of the news reports excerpted last night. Again, the link to the entire slide presentation is at top.
Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021*
*This is the published report. The New York Times, Forbes, and the Washington Post all report that there was a slide presentation at CDC that painted an even more dire picture. Dr. Walensky, CDC director briefed Congress on the internal slide presentation, but it has not been made public. NYT and WaPo have seen some of the slides. This new unpublished data is at bottom below the hash marks.
7:26 p.m. July 30.
This is the CDC report that caused the change of guidance. Excerpts:
Summary
What is added by this report?
In July 2021, following multiple large public events in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts, town, 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents who had traveled to the town during July 3–17; 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients. Cycle threshold values were similar among specimens from patients who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Jurisdictions might consider expanded prevention strategies, including universal masking in indoor public settings, particularly for large public gatherings that include travelers from many areas with differing levels of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
...
During July 2021, 469 cases of COVID-19 associated with multiple summer events and large public gatherings in a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, were identified among Massachusetts residents; vaccination coverage among eligible Massachusetts residents was 69%. Approximately three quarters (346; 74%) of cases occurred in fully vaccinated persons (those who had completed a 2-dose course of mRNA vaccine [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] or had received a single dose of Janssen [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine ≥14 days before exposure)....Overall, 274 (79%) vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection were symptomatic.Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated; no deaths were reported.
Real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction... cycle threshold...values [virus load] in specimens from 127 vaccinated persons with breakthrough cases were similar to those from 84 persons who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown. The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is highly transmissible; vaccination is the most important strategy to prevent severe illness and death.
Having a "strategy" does not speak to the strategy's efficacy. I can have an excellent, truly excellent, strategy to defend against LeBron James. I'm not going to be effective. The paper addresses efficacy of the vaccination strategy at bottom.
...
By July 26, a total of 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents; dates of positive specimen collection ranged from July 6 through July 25...median age was 40 years...
Oooh.
...
Five were hospitalized; as of July 27, no deaths were reported. One hospitalized patient (age range = 50–59 years) was not vaccinated and had multiple underlying medical conditions.†† Four additional, fully vaccinated patients§§ aged 20–70 years were also hospitalized, two of whom had underlying medical conditions.
Okay, let's unpack this. The "real-time reverse threshold values" gobbledy-gook means "virus load". So, 346 fully vaccinated people were infected, 123 un-part-unk were infected; 274 of the fully vaxed-and-infected had symptoms, 127 of the fully-vaxed-and-infected had virus loads similar to 84 un-part-unk, 4 fully vaxed were made so ill that they had to be hospitalized, 1 un-partial-unk was hospitalized; none died.
So, you are nearly three times likelier to contract Delta if you are fully vaccinated (74%) than if you aren't or are partially vaccinated (26%); almost half (46% ) of the fully-vaxed are going to get a virus load of similar heft to the un-part-unk; a higher percentage of the fully-vaxed are going to get sick (79%)! and more of the fully-vaxed (1.4%) are going get soo sick that they have to go to hospital than the un-part-unk (1.15%). Nobody, vaxed, unvaxed or in between went to funeral home (0%).
It does not follow from the data on this one outbreak that vaccination is an efficacious strategy against Delta
...
The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations. First, data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak.
Oomph.
As population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of COVID-19 cases.
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The "strategy" of getting vaccinated has its most important desideratum, NOT GETTING COVID-19. The "strategy" of getting the whole country vaccinated is to decrease the total number of cases of COVID-19. How can it be that as vaccinations increase cases among the vaccinated will increase? That is complete BULLSHIT.
Second, asymptomatic breakthrough infections might be underrepresented because of detection bias.
Okay, they are grasping at straws. They are using weasel words and trying to explain away the horrifying 79% symptomatic-vaxed. Look, this is a MAJOR study on a shocking incident that received widespread popular publicity. The evidence is not anecdotal, it is very good, hard data. If the evidence had not been good enough they wouldn't have written this highly-anticipated damn paper. You can make reasonable scientific findings based on solid data like this. They made such findings. They then simultaneously gulped and shit themselves.
Third, demographics of cases likely reflect those of attendees at the public gatherings, as events were marketed to adult male participants; further study is underway to identify other population characteristics among cases, such as additional demographic characteristics and underlying health conditions including immunocompromising conditions.
...
Finally, [the virus load blah blah blah] might provide a crude correlation to the amount of virus present in a sample and can also be affected by factors other than viral load.
####################################
[The slide presentation] strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.
The Barnstable study alone does NOT justify "emphasize on vaccination as the best defense". The data from Barnstable show the opposite: more of the vaccinated get infected than the un-part-unk category; more of the fully vaccinated were hospitalized than the un-part-unk. On this metric the sample size may be so small as to lose significant meaning its meaning was significant enough for the published report to present them.
...
“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.
CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public.
One of the slides ...estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.
The document outlines “communication challenges” fueled by cases in vaccinated people, including concerns from local health departments about whether coronavirus vaccines remain effective and a “public convinced vaccines no longer work/booster doses needed.”
That is not a "communication challenge," that is a data-driven challenge. The "communication" should be plain. In the case of Barnstable, the vaccine gold standards produced 1) significantly a greater proportion of infections in the fully vaxed than in the un-part-unk 2) greater symptomatology in the fully faxed than in "other" and 3) for what it is worth four of the five incidents of hospitalization.
The presentation highlights the daunting task the CDC faces. It must continue to emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines at preventing severe illness and death while acknowledging milder breakthrough infections may not be so rare after all, and that vaccinated individuals are transmitting the virus. The agency must move the goal posts of success in full public view.
The Barnstable County data of the published report do NOT "emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines against severe illness." In fact the first "caveat" at the end of the published report notes explicitly that "data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak." [in Barnstable]. The undersigned wishes to emphasize that this is a major study with the outbreak under study chosen specifically by CDC. It has no right to hide more damning data nor to massage the Barnstable findings into something more easy to swallow by Americans. But the major caveat the undersigned wishes to add is "during this outbreak." This is a major study--but of only one outbreak. Others may soften the gut punch of the Barnstable published report, although the slide presentation in this post addendum is worse, not better.
The CDC declined to comment.
...“Waiting even days to publish the data could result in needless suffering and as public health professionals we cannot accept that.”
...Matthew Seeger, a risk communication expert at Wayne State University in Detroit, said...Because public health officials had emphasized the great efficacy of the vaccines, the realization that they aren’t perfect may feel like a betrayal.
“We’ve done a great job of telling the public these are miracle vaccines,” Seeger said. “We have probably fallen a little into the trap of over-reassurance"...
The CDC’s revised mask guidance stops short of what the internal document calls for. “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant,” it states.
Leveling with the public should not be a "communications challenge." Neither should shielding more ominous data from the public.
The [slide presentation] includes CDC data from studies showing that the vaccines are not as effective in immunocompromised patients and nursing home residents, raising the possibility that some at-risk individuals will need an additional vaccine dose.
...
The agency faced criticism from outside experts this week when it changed the mask guidance without releasing the data, a move that violated scientific norms, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
“You don’t, when you’re a public health official, want to be saying, ‘Trust us, we know, we can’t tell you how,’” Jamieson said. “The scientific norm suggests that when you make a statement based on science, you show the science. … And the second mistake is they do not appear to be candid about the extent to which breakthroughs are yielding hospitalizations.”
...Walter A. Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, said he was struck by data showing that vaccinated people who became infected with delta shed just as much virus as those who were not vaccinated. The slide references an outbreak in Barnstable County, Mass., where vaccinated and unvaccinated people shed nearly identical amounts of virus.
“I think this is very important in changing things,” Orenstein said.
A person working in partnership with the CDC on investigations of the delta variant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, said the data came from a July 4 outbreak in Provincetown, Mass. Genetic analysis of the outbreak showed that people who were vaccinated were transmitting the virus to other vaccinated people. The person said the data was “deeply disconcerting” and a “canary in the coal mine” for scientists who had seen the data.
“I think the central issue is that vaccinated people are probably involved to a substantial extent in the transmission of delta,” Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University epidemiologist, wrote in an email after reviewing the CDC slides.
Friday, July 30, 2021
COVID-19 BIDEN+190 (July 29)
14-day changes
+151% Cases. Up.
+151% Cases. Up.
+76% Hospitalizations. Up.
+15% Deaths. Up.
7-day daily averages
71,621 new Cases. Up 4.3k average per day. Cases have risen twenty-six consecutive iterations of the 7-day daily average since 10,608 on July 5, a 700% increase in less than a month.
NA Hospitalizations.
321 Deaths. Up 4 average/day. The deaths daily average has increased ten consecutive iterations from 248 in the July 20 iteration. Deaths are up 77% since July 20.
CDC's ensemble deaths forecast goes out as far as one month from now. The ensemble's four constituent weekly forecasts all increase, so there is reason to expect that the current forecast high one month from now will be higher in the next weekly forecast. The forecast is cumulative weekly deaths. To make the metric consistent with the daily numbers I have divided the forecast by seven. With that explanation the CDC forecasts 522 deaths/day one month from now.
The Spirit of Yul Brynner Lives
In Springfield, Mo., where coronavirus cases spiked this summer, Russell Taylor sat in a hospital gown, an oxygen cannula draped across his face, to offer a pro-vaccine testimonial in a hospital video. “I don’t see how I could not get it now,” he said.
A Texas man who underwent a double-lung transplant after contracting the virus made a plea on local television for others to get vaccinated.
And in a shaking voice, a hospital-clinic administrator in rural Utah described how she had been pummeled by double pneumonia and sepsis after choosing not to get vaccinated. The woman, Stormy, said it had taken weeks to summon the nerve to speak out in a video posted by her local health department. She only did so using her first name because she worried that Covid deniers would say she was making it all up.
CDC Delta Data
…the internal document lays out a broader and even grimmer view of the variant.
The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox.
“Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential,” the document said.
Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document noted.
The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.
…an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.
I remember that vividly. It was shocking.
Detailed analysis of the spread of cases showed that people infected with Delta carry enormous amounts of virus in their nose and throat, regardless of vaccination status.
Infection with the Delta variant may be more likely to lead to severe illness, the document noted. Studies from Canada and Scotland found that people infected with the variant are more likely to be hospitalized, while research in Singapore indicated that they are more likely to require oxygen.
"May be" is a weasel word signifying nothing. I am skeptical that a weasel word would appear in a scientific document but I do not have access to "the document". In this instance I have no alternative but to take the word of the reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, in whose reporting I lack trust.
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Tremendous article here, by Matt Hinton of Saturday Down South. In taking the view from space Matt shows us that the college football landscape has not really changed, the same land forms are recognizable, the whole world hasn't exploded. And telescoping for a closer look, yep, there are Alabama and Notre Dame, Oklahoma and Ohio State, the evergreens, ever greening, and there are the smaller-growth trees, Pitt, Oregon State, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, all the teams of the compass schools, all the rest who play "big time" college tackle football. Reverting to the bigger view, the smaller trees still stand a chance. The college football playoff will almost certainly be expanded, giving one-year growth spurt programs like UCF and Cincinnati a chance to prove their mettle against the Sequoias (good luck with that). Pitt and Georgia Tech and Washington and BYU have won exactly as many national championships in the last fifty years as has Texas. That would be one. In the view from space Matt Hinton is dead on. Matt concludes that the game will still be as compelling, and the game is the thing.
But Matt is a little optimistic, a little sanguine on the view at terra firma. What has always distinguished college tackle football from the NFL is its ancient roots and ancient rivalries. It is not just the game but those games.
Texas and Texas A&M, played every Thanksgiving for years and years; they haven't played in a decade. The two schools will meet again now and it will be like the last decade never happened. Tradition recovered.
Pitt and PSU, played every year for seventy or eighty years; they've hardly played in the new millennium and have no future meetings scheduled. It's been too long now. Pitt vs PSU was the game in the Commonwealth growing up. There is a generation of people now who have little or no memory of it and the desire, especially from State College, is just not there.
"Bedlam", Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, terribly one-sided in OU's favor but THE game in the state. Whither Bedlam now?
Nebraska and Oklahoma, the "Game of the Century," another Thanksgiving staple of the two heavyweights in the same conference, now in different conferences, with Nebraska trying to avoid the "Sooners" this year.
The "Backyard Brawl", Pitt and West Virginia. Long, long history, a little one-sided, the passion more on the 'Eers part than the Panthers, but no future games scheduled either. If the ACC invites WVU, the Backyard Brawl will be baacck.
Those ancient rivalries, which repeating, made college tackle football, are gone and the losses are grievous, irreplaceable You don't see that from space but it was those games that made the college game that we love so much, not vice versa. You can't manufacture rivalries like widgets. Pitt and Cincinnati tried to jump-start a "River City Rivalry" until the last round of realignment when Pitt landed in the ACC. Bob Diaco, the Connecticut coach at the time, tried, for reasons known only to him, to create "The Civil ConFLiCT" between Connecticut and Central Florida. That was the mother of all Fails.
Who is Pitt's rival in the ACC? Syracuse? Yawn from both schools fan bases. There are no natural rivals for Pitt in the ACC.
Who was WVU's in the Big XII (a moment of prayer please over the body)? No one.
From his locale in SEC Country Matt can be sanguine. The SEC has focused, not just on the "game," but on the rivalry games. It was either genius or genius masquerading as happenstance: the Iron Bowl, then, now, forever. The Egg Bowl, The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Florida-Tennessee, Florida-Georgia, hell, even Tennessee-Vanderbilt, and now the Red-River Rivalry transplanted in a new conference rooted in the fertile delta of the Mississippi River. Texas A&M-Alabama is a sure enough Big Game, but there is no history and if one falls on hard times it will be the Big Yawn game.
There is nothing we can do, we fans, about any of it, but sick back and enjoy the games that exist and the game that does reek of America more than any other. That is Matt's overarching recommendation to all of us. It is sound advice.
Trumpie, Ya Gettin' Ready?
@maggieNYT·Jun 1
Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).
🤪
"In reversal, Austin schools to offer virtual learning for kindergarten through 6th grade"
Sarah Gallardo [a mother]...applied after the Round Rock school district canceled its virtual option. While she was glad to hear the district had reversed course, she said she needs long-term option because her son Raymond [a 4th grader] thrived under virtual learning and his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder makes it hard for him to sit through regular classes.
Ms. Gallardo, do you think Raymond's ATHD would have been improved if the school district followed Dr. Walensky's advice that schooling should be in person and Raymond must be masked?
Team USA's Suni Lee wins gold
With the news that Simone Biles was out of the women's all-around competition, all eyes were on Sunisa Lee…
Lee was up for the challenge. The 18-year-old put together a string of masterful performances to edge Brazilian Rebeca Andrade (57.298) for the gold medal with a total score of 57.433. Lee becomes the sixth American gymnast to accomplish the feat.
Leniency?! Throw this Heroic First Responder a Parade!
Now we're old and grey Fernando
And since many years I haven't seen a rifle in your hand
Can you hear the drums Fernando
There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Fernando
A Miami-Dade County firefighter who worked at the site of the Surfside condo collapse has been arrested, and his attorney asked a judge to take that into account when setting his bond Wednesday.
The charges against Fernando Castano, 47, stem from an alleged domestic dispute [the domestic dispute included a gun and averments to commit multiple homicides] with his estranged wife Tuesday afternoon in Cutler Bay.
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Walk Back Walensky*
*Updated
It is my pleasure to say, "I told you so.":
The most effective public health guidelines are those that are simple, clear and applied consistently, said Gretchen Chapman, a professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
Thank you, Dr. Chapman!
She said it would help for leaders to set criteria so that people might know, for example, that reaching a certain threshold of infection would trigger measures such as masking.
That's a good idea. As I presciently wrote yesterday, policy-makers must needs set realistically-attainable goals! And it would help if the policy-makers told us what those goals were!
“When the weather turns cold, people say, ‘Ugh, now I have to bundle up with a scarf and coat every time I have to go out.’ We may complain that the cold weather is back, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it,” Dr. Chapman said. “Nobody is going to be happy that you have to wear a mask again, but if we could say, ‘These are the conditions again, it’s time,’ then there would not be a surprise when we get to the mask zone.”
I'm liking this chick, Dr. Gretchen Chapman! Such good, common sense advise, I wish she were the head of CDC.
But my sense is that it's too late for common sense. The Disgraced suggested we inject bleach, take that bullshit hydroxychloroquine. We have been through lockdowns, the Disgraced’s calls to "LIBERATE!" leading to premature re-openings and partial re-openings, and I wrote at the time that "there is no reentry ramp onto Lockdown Street". We’ve gone from masks mebbe, the Disgraced setting the example with NEVER!, to No! we didn't mean no masks, we meant no N95 masks, they're needed by hospital workers, to masks definitely for everybody else except the Disgraced, to no need for the vaxxed to mask!, to sorry about that, the vaxxed should mask up again, you might transmit the virus to an unvaxxed. I started masking up again before Dr. Walensky made it formal guidance because I'm a responsible guy with an above-Deliverance IQ.
...
The C.D.C. [yesterday] recommended that people wear masks indoors in counties with substantial or high infection rates, or more than 50 new cases per 100,000 people in a seven-day period. By that measure, all residents of Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana should wear masks indoors. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. counties qualify, many of them concentrated in the South.
You see, Dr. Walensky? You set yourself up again for failure. WE WANT CHAP-MAN! WE WANT CHAP-MAN!
...
The patchwork of regulations has created a confusing landscape where masks are strictly enforced on airplanes, required and mostly worn on public transportation systems like the New York City subway, and left off completely inside supermarkets, movie theaters and gyms in much of the South.
...
“You asked us to stay home,” Rita Heard Days, the [St. Louis County Council] chairwoman, told the director of the county’s public health department before voting to lift the mask mandate. “You asked us to put on masks. You asked us to stay six feet apart,” she said. “We have followed your orders, and yet we are still in a predicament. So something is not working.”
The virus has changed, Dr. Faisal Khan, the public health director, told her.
True that, Dr. Khan, but so has the guidance.
...
The surging virus, fueled by the more contagious Delta variant, has led the C.D.C. to respond with guidance that harked back to a year ago...
But after months of shutdowns and with three vaccines available to protect Americans, those trying to get people to wear face coverings again in the middle of a long, hot summer are encountering defiance and hostility.
...
Even in Washington State, where tough virus restrictions last year enjoyed substantial public backing, there appeared to be scant support for stepped-up masking now.
“Everybody has access to vaccines in our country at the moment, and so I think that if people are not taking advantage of that, it’s poor personal decision-making,” said State Senator Mark Mullet, a Democrat.
Yeah, that's the other thing. I'm pretty callous about unvaxxed people getting sick, even dying.
Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, urged all residents to follow the federal guidelines and announced that mask requirements in schools would remain. He suggested that the state could require vaccinations for eligible students if rates do not increase.
...
“It’s an inconvenience and it’s annoying,” said Tina Kim, 40, who sat on the outdoor patio of a Mexican restaurant in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday night. “But I don’t think there is a reliable way of filtering who is vaccinated when you walk into a store. It’s just easier for everyone to put it back on.”
Ms. Kim is right. We should "Just Do It," but these people will not:
Hours before the C.D.C.’s announcement on Tuesday, the school board in Broward County, Fla., postponed a meeting on back-to-school protection rules after a small crowd of mask-less adults and children showed up to the lobby of the school district headquarters and got into a tense exchange with masked members of the local teachers’ union.
The recommendation that Dr. Walensky made yesterday that I thought was not only unrealistic but, I suspect, detrimental to learning was universal school masking. Every grade school kid is by nature ADD. Now you want those kids to wear those annoying masks when they’re in school. T'AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN, DR WALENSKY, T’AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.
7/27/21, 12:36 p.m.
Reversing a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to recommend on Tuesday that people vaccinated for the coronavirus resume wearing masks indoors in certain areas of the country.
The change follows reports of rising...infections [of] the Delta variant...in people who were fully immunized, and case surges in regions with low vaccination rates. The vaccines remain effective against the worst outcomes of infection...involving the Delta variant.
In Reversal, C.D.C. to Recommend Some Vaccinated People Wear Masks Indoors
The new guidance would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
This hurts CDC's and Dr. Walensky's credibility. I started wearing a N95 again a couple of days ago after seeing the rise of cases nationwide and in particular in the Asshole of America, and especially after reading about what the scientists refer to confusingly as "breakthrough" infections, a term that I delete every fucking time I see it. Experts: To normal people "breakthroughs," especially in science, are good things. Couldn't you have come with a new term, "breakout," "outbreak," break in,"?Reversing a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to recommend on Tuesday that people vaccinated for the coronavirus resume wearing masks indoors in certain areas of the country.
The change follows reports of rising...infections [of] the Delta variant...in people who were fully immunized, and case surges in regions with low vaccination rates. The vaccines remain effective against the worst outcomes of infection...involving the Delta variant.
[I thought I had read something similar to this previously. I thought it was that Delta, although much more contagious, is not as likely to lead to "the worst outcomes," Oh God, New York Times, why do you use a stupid fucking twee euphemism, it's DEATH, QUASIS, DEATH!]
But the new guidance, the details of which are expected later Tuesday, would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
But the new guidance, the details of which are expected later Tuesday, would mark a sharp turnabout from the agency’s position since May that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor spaces.
As recently as last week, an agency spokesman said that the C.D.C. had no plans to change its guidance, unless there were a significant change in the science.
...
The C.D.C.’s initial guidance in May said people fully protected from the coronavirus could go mask-free indoors in most scenarios, but recommended that unvaccinated people still wear masks. Those recommendations drew sharp criticism from some experts, who said it was premature given the vast swaths of unvaccinated people in the country.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C.’s director, at the time pointed to two scientific findings as significant factors. Few vaccinated people become infected with the virus, and transmission seems rarer still...
...
But those data, and the C.D.C.’s decision, were based on infections of previous versions of the virus before the Delta variant began sweeping through the country. Reports of clusters of infections among fully immunized people have suggested that the variant may be able to break through the vaccine barrier more often than previous iterations of the virus.
Oh my God, Dr. Walensky, you had the example of India before you in May, did you not? Why oh why did you take the fatal leap over the evidence right before your eyes on Delta to studies on previous variants? GOD!
Cowardly Cubans
¡Volver Cubanos!
Cubans: You're number one in three things, sugar cane, prostitution and fleeing. Don't run to the United States and then ask us to fight your battles. We don't want you or your problems. We've got enough Domino, hookers, bitching, and cowards. Maybe once every sixty or a hundred years you could stay and fight for your own country instead of running crying to America? Probably not, you don't have the guts. Stay and fight or stay and suffer, but stay. Don't come here. And you who are here, go back. We don't want you.
COVID-INDIA, COVID-U.S.
India was the first country ravaged by Hurricane Delta. India's cases and deaths graphs from Johns Hopkins:
India's Delta-driven cases peaked at 414,188 on May 6, 2021. India was almost completely unvaccinated when delta came ashore. Delta swept passed India exceedingly quickly. Delta-driven cases began their clear rise on April 1. 81k cases. Thirty-six days later cases peaked and immediately began declining. Cases bottomed out on July 24 before rising slightly. Deaths peaked in that anomalous-looking spike at 7,374 on June 10. On July 27, India reported 43,654 new cases and 640 new deaths. Lag, yes, I know I know I know. But the death interval isn't thirty-four days either. Besides those two weird minarets deaths declined from mid-June forward.
The U.S. peaked, before Delta struck and before vaccinations, at 300,462 cases, not totally dissimilar to India's peak, on January 2, 2021. Cases leveled in mid-February and bottomed out in early July. And then Delta came ashore. It's a little arbitrary in dating Delta's dawn in the U.S. but I have chosen July 6, 24,224 new cases. Is our July 6 India's April 1? If so, we had about one-quarter the cases India had on Delta Dawn. If so, following India's course precisely, Delta-driven cases will peak in the U.S. on August 11. I don't see that happening. I see the Delta rise continuing for way longer than that.
Deaths in the U.S. peaked at that anomalous-looking spike on April 7, 2021 at 2,593. Lag, yes, I know I know I know but the death interval isn't three+ months either. On July 27, with the adult population 69% vaccinated the U.S. reported 70,740 new cases and only 533 deaths. Seventy-five percent more new cases than India on July 27 yet over one hundred fewer deaths. Indeed, the current daily death pattern is indistinguishable from several iterations going back to the beginning of June. Of course, Delta hit the U.S. just recently. Of course. Of course, cases are going to rise. The death interval is not baked into the death numbers yet. Of course, deaths will rise as cases continue to rise. But how much? Maybe to that mini-minaret of late May, 1,362? Reasonable. But beyond a reasonable doubt U.S. deaths are not going to rise to that April 7 spire.
COVID-19 BIDEN+189
Now I know the increases are...decreasing.
14-day change (through 7/27)
+145% Cases. (okay, that's up one percentage point beat me whip me).+70% Hospitalizations. Down 2%.
+6% Deaths. Down 1%
Cases 7-day daily average graph
Worst.
Hospitalizations 7-day daily average graph
Very bad.
Deaths 7-day daily average graph
Least bad. Barely worse. Delta dawn is not killing Americans in the slightest proportionate to the increases in cases and hospitalizations.
The Land of the Free and the Home of the Prioritizing-Well-Being-Selfs
“We wholeheartedly support Simone’s decision and applaud her bravery in prioritizing her well-being. Her courage shows, yet again, while she is a role model for so many.”-U.S.A. Gymnastics
“I’m still struggling with some things,” Biles said after the event. “It just sucks when you are fighting with your own head.”
Biles told her coach and a team doctor that she was not in the right “head space” to continue because she was afraid of injuring herself, and also because she didn’t want to jeopardize the team’s chances at winning a medal.
While she had come to the Tokyo Olympics feeling “pretty good,” the weight of expectations on her as Team U.S.A.’s biggest star at the Tokyo Games became tougher by the day, and in the hours before the team final she said she was shaking and couldn’t nap. In the end, the pressure was just too heavy for her to bear, she said.
In the days leading up to the Olympics, Biles had been struggling with a few skills and was trying to overcome a mental block that kept her from easily performing her routines. That mental block is not uncommon in gymnastics, [a U.S.A. Gymnastics coach] said, but it usually happens at practice, not at a competition.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that it’s such a mental sport,” [the coach] said... explaining that the mental blocks take a while to work through before a gymnast can begin trusting herself enough to perform her skills again. “If you have a week or two to prepare, you could probably get her back to what she needed to do.”
In Biles’s case at these Games, however, she did not have two weeks to spare.
Okay, that is a full, balanced, fair account of the Simone Biles incident, taken from the New York Times. The undersigned will incur a wrathful shitstorm raining down upon his head with his take following, and that is going to be the way it is going to be.
A mental block can be as no-go as a physical block; "not right in the head space", Ms. Biles' words, as not right as not right in the knee space. There is no fault blowing out your knee, no fault in blowing your mind. You can't go in either state. There's no shame in whatever ailment kept you out. But neither is it "bravery" or "courage". You can't go! There's nothing you can do about it.
Hell, Kyrie Irving missed a basketball game because he had been bitten by bed bugs. Justise Winslow missed most of two seasons when his back didn't feel "right"--although team doctors thought Winslow could go, that it was psychosomatic. This is the thing, though: the examples of Kyrie Irving and Justise Winslow do not help make Ms. Biles' quitting more credible, they make Ms. Biles less credible.
But there is more to Simone Biles' situation. Although not in quotation marks as Ms. Biles' words I have no doubt that when the New York Times writes, she said she was shaking and couldn't nap that she said she was shaking and couldn't nap.
Shaking from nerves. That's not a mental block.
The weight of expectations...the pressure was just too heavy for her to bear, she said.
Biles told her coach and a team doctor...she was afraid of injuring herself, and also because she didn’t want to jeopardize the team’s chances at winning a medal.
Didn't want to hurt the team: that is transparent bullshit. You take one for the team, like Willis Reed hobbling out after half-time. Reed was the star, Biles was the star. Stars don't help the team by sitting out. Simone Biles was the best gymnast that ever was. It was not a mental block, like an arterial blockage, something that threatened her "well-being" and forced her to no-go, it was a failure of heart. Simone Biles went woolly in the knees; she spit the bit; she was Devon Loch coming down the stretch to the finish line and belly-flopping. Simone Biles just quit. And not just on herself, on her team. There is shame in that.
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
COVID-19 BIDEN+188
As yinz all know this here undersigned don't track the daily stats like he used to so I may be wrong here but cases are +144% from two weeks ago, the undersigned thinks the change was in the +200's, hospitalizations are up exactly half that, 72%, I don't have reasonable faith that that is less than when I last checked; and deaths are a +7% from two weeks back. Make me a liar but I swear deaths have been up double digits recently.
3-D Animation Champlain Towers South, Mike Bell
Well, this is the best videographic explanation of how the building collapsed. It repeats what is certain now, that the pool deck collapsed first, but Mr Bell states at the end that the pool deck collapse should not have led to the destruction of the two towers. Wonderful video by Mr Bell.
"A Fight for the Soul of America"
Our national anthem has it that America is the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This site contains much writing on the soul, "the animating principle," of America--that a can-do optimism animated America, that yes, we had bravery in our soul. We had the "spirit" to complete a solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927; the daring, in 1962, to "choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard." And to do it in 1969. There is also much writing here that the soul of America was changed by 9/11, that afterwards we became a more inward-looking, tentative, fearful country.
Where was the Joseph Welch of 1954 to stand up to a dangerous demagogue in 2015-2020? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?
The 2020 election was "a fight for the soul of America" as candidate Joe Biden said repeatedly in 2020. It was, now-President Biden was right. We, and he, won the fight but the battle for America's soul is not over.
Even a repudiated, disgraced figure still makes Republicans cower in fear.
Where was the civic responsibility of 1955 in eagerly volunteering for testing of a new polio vaccine?
Where was the exhilaration in 2020 in the triumph of American ingenuity yet again in developing in record time the most effective vaccines in the world against the most dangerous, resilient virus in mankind's history?
In place national togetherness we have a country divided by vaccination denial, vaccination refusal. As David Brooks memorably commented, "We’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima; we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS." More Americans will die in 2020-22 of coronavirus than died of the Spanish Flu virus a century ago, when we didn't know shit.
Where was the other-centered heroism of the individual ordinary American that we saw in Lenny Skutnik in 1982 among the professionals in Surfside in 2021?
We have lost it. Anybody here seen my old friend, Uncle Sam? I just looked around and he was gone. The soul is a malleable thing and having changed before it can change back again but ever since 2001 we have lost our soul.
'Eers
Lol West Virginia is primping, posturing and audaciously lifting her skirt to solicit a marriage proposal from the B1G or ACC. The 'Eer Athletic Director released a statement last night that included the following,
"We...have served the [Big XII] as a prestigious academic institution.
...
"WVU is proud to be a proven academic leader ranking at the highest level of research activity in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. In fact, we are among a select few that are land-grant, doctoral research universities with a comprehensive medical school. The University's faculty are increasingly recognized for excellence, and our legacy of student achievement includes 25 Rhodes Scholars, 25 Truman Scholars, 46 Goldwater Scholars."
The ACC should propose to WVU, but they didn't previously. And the reason is WVU was and is NOT a "prestigious academic institution." And the Carnegie Classification, whatever that is, I'm sure it's great, is not the academic grouping that matters. That is the American Association of Universities (AAU), the sixty-six top in the country. The B1G has said reportedly that it will not consider non-AAU schools for expansion. I feel bad for West Virginia that they did this. They shouldn't have debased themselves in this way. WVU is meretricious enough to be an ACC member.
College Football ‘Super League’?
Texas and Oklahoma will eventually be a part of one giant college football conference that will feature Ohio State, USC, Oregon, Michigan, Alabama, Texas A&M, Wisconsin and 20 or so others. It will be the NFL’s real minor leagues.
There is no way TCU, Baylor, Wake Forest, Duke and “the others” will be a part of that equation.
You can add Pitt to “the others.” And I am A-Okay with that! If there is to be a semi-pro Super League I want Pitt to have no part of it. In yesterday’s post I said I hoped Pitt would take two steps back if terra firma further deteriorated. With the Super League we don’t havta. We can stay put in the ACC with “Wake Forest, Duke and ‘the others’” or be part of a new conference in the Northeast. I'd be for that.
In the eight schools this reporter names as projected members of the Super League are represented the PAC 12, the B1G and the SEC. In the “twenty or so” more schools referenced we can surely include Auburn, Georgia and Florida from the SEC, PSU from the B1G, Notre Dame(?), Clemson, Florida State(?), and Miami(?) from the ACC. Take Michigan, Ohio State and PSU from the B1G and you have, what?, the L1'L? You sure don’t have the B1G. Take Nike and SC from the PAC and you could still have a PAC. Clemson is surely part of the Super League. Subtract FSU, Miami and ND and the ACC would go back to a Tobacco Road conference, which would unchain Pitt, Syracuse, and Boston College and allow a Union conference to form. "The Union forever, hurrah boys, hurrah!" I'd be all in for the Union. I’m for this Super League idea.
Monday, July 26, 2021
FT Miami-Skaid Fire Rescue 1, Dead 98
Estelle Hedaya, 54 years old, was the last victim identified.
Should we reprise the "Heroes Welcome"? No.
Speaking from a coronavirus unit in Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Dr. Michael Bolding said he wished people could see these patients' faces. The video, posted on Facebook on July 16, has been shared more than 6,300 times.
Bolding said the sick people knew "that they may be short for this world because they didn't get their vaccine."
"...that look on a patient's face, I promise you, would be more motivating than anything to go ahead and get your vaccine if you have not already," he said.
Oh my goodness. Do any of you remember the Yul Brenner "don't smoke" commercial?
This is the key to vaccinations. Get a sick person to agree to speak in a "get vaccinated" commercial.
"It Just Means More"
This post is on my beloved alma mater the University of Pittsburgh.
"It just means more" is the motto of the Southeastern Conference, the richest and the best college tackle football conference in the land. Of course, my beloved Pitt "Panthers" are not a member of the SEC on accounta we aren't in the Southeast part of the land but rather straddle the Northeast and the near Midwest. Pitt is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which we aren't on the Atlantic coast either. One illustration, not nearly the most important, of the various meanings of "It just means more" and how all the meanings distort things in higher education throughout all the land.
"It", preeminently, means money. It means more money for you to be an SEC member. It also means football. Football games in the SEC just mean more because of traditional rivalries and because the best collegiate football talent plays in the conference. The SEC acts as a black hole does in space. Even if you don't get sucked in a black hole distorts time and space for everything else in its vicinity. The SEC does the same. Colleges are not for-profit enterprises, their truck is education not money. Tackle football is one of many sports that colleges offer their students for their recreation. Tackle football is infinitely the most popular sport on college campuses, but, and this is key, most popular to spectate, not participate. College football is infinitely the most popular campus sport off campus too. People who have never attended alma mater purchase tickets to seats to see the games. In many cases, on top of that they donate immense sums of money to have their name affixed to the stadium the football team plays in. "It" is all about the money.
The University of Pittsburgh is one of the oldest universities in America, a well-respected university, a university proud of its history and accomplishments in education; it is one of the most fabulously endowed universities on the entire planet, and it has a long tradition of playing tackle football on a high competitive plane, and occasionally has fielded the best team in the land. Pitt doesn't pay players, it doesn't break rules, it plays the game ethically. The "it" in Pitt is education. Not money, not sports generally, not football particularly.
However, as its locale straddles regions of the country, Pitt straddles priorities. SEC people were taken aback that Pitt officials were almost apologetic for the football team's participation in the Sugar Bowl in 1977, the last year the team won a national championship. "We're more than football," Pitt officials repeatedly emphasized. Well, they haven't had to correct perceptions since. In the forty-one years from 1980 through 2020 Pitt is an average, in both meanings, six wins and five losses on the football field. The ACC fits Pitt in this sense: the conference's nickname is the "almost competitive conference."
Pitt has the money to pay whatever it takes to hire Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney, Jimbo Fisher, the best tackle football coaches in the country. But it sorta don't wanna. It wanna pay a more modest sum to get a more modest coach to fit its more modest football ambitions and if it gets a national championship in the bahgin that's fine too! Pitt, however, is not going to get into a bidding war with Alabama or Clemson or Texas A&M in paying top dollar for a top flight coach. It did not in 1982 when its last great coach, Jackie Sherrill, left for more money in College Station; it did not in 1997 or 2010 or 2011 or 2012 or 2014 or 2015. Pitt has its priorities and does not have to be "It" in tackle football. It wants to be "competitive', or almost. As a consequence Pitt has not been It in college football in four decades. But it sorta wanna.
When you sorta wanna and sorta don't you always meet forks in the road where you've gotta make up your two minds all over again. The Southeastern Conference's gobbling of the biggest, bestest football schools in recent years has constantly forced Pitt to straddle the two diverging paths, education and football, and a fella's legs can only straddle so far, know what I mean? The undersigned does not know how SEC expansion with Texas and Oklahoma is going to affect Pitt. I think it's going to affect the ACC somehow or other but I don't know how. All I know is that we're not at the end. For Pitt though it's straddle time again.
Writing as just one alum I do not want to see another "Major Change" in Pitt's prioritizing of football. The ACC will play on and Pitt can muddle along with it, but I don't want to see Pitt spend any more money in hiring a top coach than it is wasting on Pat Narduzzi for an average 7-5 record. There are oodles of coaches out there who can give you 7-5 for a lot less than Pat's $3.2M per year. The overwhelming likelihood is that the ACC will not materially change and Pitt will ho-hum along. If, a long shot to be sure, the SEC's gravitational pull becomes so strong that the fork in the road this time for Pitt is to get sucked into the black money hole and pay more money to compete with the Alabama's and Texas's and Oklahoma's, I hope Pitt takes two steps back and brings both legs together on a lower football plane, not in a "Power Five" conference or even a "Group of Five" but in the Football Championship Subdivision. I'd rather us play Villanova than Vanderbilt, or even Temple. You don't have to apologize for that.
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