Lurker > Esuriat

Louisiana added over 5k cases today, third highest figure for a single day since the start.

That escalated quickly.

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Essy

Damn that's terrible. I'm sorry for your loss

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Essy

Apparently the hospitals in southwest Missouri (centered around Springfield) and northern Arkansas are seeing a greater influx of patients than at any point through the pandemic.

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Essy

I'm kind of skeptical about the 6 month figure quoted by Pfizer, but at the same time I see it as certain eventuality within the year anyway with almost no downside and a benefit of being customized specifically for variants of concern. So I'm thinking a timing of availability around September and October should be good, and hopefully no conflict with administration of flu shots.

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Essy

https://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/coronavirus/article_9e1c37a3-c4bb-5966-a4b6-12709e60bc26.html

Fortunately there won't be the same case-to-death rate that was seen in previous waves since older demographics have higher vaccination rates, but there's still a pretty huge number of people susceptible people in states like Missouri. Supposedly the Delta variant is causing more severe disease, but I'm still on the fence about how real that is. I remember the same alleged trend of "more frequent hospitalizations among younger people" going on when the British/Alpha variant was taking hold and then finally after a few months that was disproven.

But until then it should be treated as a possibility.

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Essy

I can't wait until the 7-day average of cases in the US falls to 4 digits. And hopefully that truly does happen here in a couple of weeks. We're also getting to an interesting point now with the weather because June 9th was the beginning of the trend back upward last year heading into the summer wave.

Though a key difference from last year is that back then states like Texas, California, Arizona and most of the South were very clearly heading upward starting around mid-May. It was just that the earlier, more critically hit places in the US were trending down at a faster rate up until that date.

That isn't happening this year, as far as I can tell.

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Essy

My county is only like 55% of 12+ partially vaccinated. It's below the Virginia average and I was getting worried about our infection rate being the highest in the state.

But then suddenly over the past week we've seen only 4 cases.

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Essy

I think the worst of it is already over. It was a slow build up of feeling slightly feverish starting at about 5 hours after my shot. My arm was sore but not as bad as the first time.

Then right at midnight (14 hours after the shot) my fever surged much higher and I had severe chills for only about 3 hours before it all started letting off. I ended up sleeping about 10 hours. There's still a residual fatigue and my cold tolerance is still a little low, but nothing terrible.

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Essy

Just got my second dose. Pretty exciting to finally be at this point.

Now to just wait for my body's indignation.

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Essy

Virginia today reported the lowest number of cases in a day since April 15th of last year, which was back during the period when Virginia was almost dead last in the country in testing. I believe only Kansas was worse at that time.

Hospitalizations are at their lowest level since March of last year.

It's pretty encouraging!

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Essy

It's now about 24 hours since I got my first dose.

I was a bit sleep deprived when I got my shot thanks to insomnia, and then I oscillated between feeling okay and feeling awful the rest of the day. I can't actually say how much was related to lack of sleep and how much was the vaccine. My left deltoid got stiff and sore, but nothing too bad.

Then I slept 9 hours last night and all that's left is a little ache in the shoulder.

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Essy

There likely is a causal link just like with the AZ/Oxford vaccine since both use adenovirus vectors, but the risk is specifically contained to one demographic. These clots are on average far more serious than the ones associated with birth control so it's a question of tradeoff of risk to very specific demographics.

COVID is certainly still more deadly even to the 18-48 demographic of women, but it's less of a difference than with other demographics. I really hope they can resolve this and resume before the end of the week with updated guidelines and just give a different vaccine to anyone for whom there's a contraindication. Also hopefully with more specificity than "all women under 50."

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Essy

I was expecting to have to snatch an appointment at a pharmacy, and have been trying to do so since the 4th, but I got contacted by the VDH yesterday.

I'm getting Moderna juice next week.

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Essy

Vaccines have opened up to everyone in my health district and they seem to be fairly regularly available from appointments from local pharmacies. I may not have to even wait for the VDH to get around to selecting me from the pre-registration list.

Feeling pretty good about things now!

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Essy

Virginia is opening up eligibility to all on the 18th, which still feels pretty slow. Fortunately my health district is tracking ahead of the state in general so I could always wind up getting it before that date.

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Essy

Virginia has a vague statement of opening them up to everyone "soon" but I have no idea how soon that would actually be.

As an addendum to my last post, I should say that the stockpile of AZ vaccine the US has, if it gets largely ignored here, should absolutely be donated to less affluent countries. Because it still very clearly provides protection.

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Essy

I've defended AZ/Oxford a few times because I still think it's an effective vaccine but they've done themselves zero favors in how they've handled the contracting for doing the trials and yeah, there are additional problems with their supply line.

Also at this point we're also in a situation where if you get one dose now you won't get the second until nearly the end of June because of the three month gap. I know it's from a position of privilege that I say this but that doesn't seem too appealing when I could be done with the process a lot sooner.

At least we also have Novavax's vaccine candidate coming along in May and that one seems pretty nice.

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Essy

Good luck with shedding it again! I believe it'll be that way for a lot of people since I expect the "return to normal" will represent an equally large shake up of routines that should get a lot of people back to the original habits.

For myself I was on disability for anxiety going into the pandemic so little inherently changed except that my anxiety has actually gotten a little better.

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Essy

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/march-weight-change

And now we've got Krispy Kreme offering free donuts for vaccinations lol

I've lost weight through the pandemic, but it was about 10 pounds and it wasn't really undesired. It was just a little unexpected.

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Essy

Lots of states are now laying out their dates for opening up vaccinations to the general public. It might be the majority of them now with dates ranging from the end of March to the end of April.

Meanwhile Virginia has said nothing so far and is just moving to Phase 1c (other essential workers like service industries, electric workers, etc.) in just a couple of places. 1b was actually a pretty broad category of "All 65+ or 16-64 with comorbitiies" but the vaccination rate has actually slowed some in the last couple of weeks. I think Virginia should open it up to everyone no later than April 5 - 12, but even that feels too slow if vaccination rates are truly beginning to decline because of demand.

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Essy

Despite all evidence showing no departure from the standard incidence of DVT/other blood clots versus the general population and no difference seen in the UK versus DVTs found in people who have received Pfizer/BioNTech.

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Essy

Several European countries (mostly central and eastern) are currently seeing their worst infection rates since the beginning. A number of Middle East nations are in the same boat, like Jordan. Most other have at least seen a worsening of the situation since the start of February. The UK has continued to improve like the US has, in general.

So far in the US the only state that has trended back up in both cases and hospitalizations is Michigan. Though there are a number of others that are in plateau.

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Essy

The US will surpass 100 million vaccine doses given this week.

Related, both of my parents should be getting their first doses this week, so I'm pretty happy about that.

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Essy

Save

Doom mood dropped off but I'm sure it'll be back

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Essy

This topic got me to finally make an effort rebuild my personal WAD library. A hard drive failure back in 2015/2016 made me lose it all and I'd only grabbed a few since then. Now I have probably 90% of what I had before, plus some more recent stuff. It all comes out to about 1.3GB.

Also good luck with TNT! I think the good maps make up for the less than stellar ones, though I've seen plenty who disagree. It represents a more concerted effort to achieve a bit more realism in level design, something that continued to be a hallmark of Team TNT's designs going forward. Whether that actually resulted in better gameplay varied.

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Essy

Daily Mail's distortions and intentional omissions of information in their writing is enough to justify throwing the whole thing in the bin. If they report on something it can be an indication to verify elsewhere, but I'm not about to handwave the details which are... important in actually qualifying the nature of what's factual.

But whatever, at least it wasn't like Sputnik.

Also I've noticed business media groups, for whatever reason, have been among the most click-baity sources out there through the pandemic. CNBC, Financial Times and Bloomberg have been awful.

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Essy

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how or why the 1918 flu died down the way it did, though there's likely a similarity reflected in the declining numbers we're seeing from COVID right now.

It didn't hit a level of herd immunity like you'd expect would be needed for its level transmissibility (R0 of 2-3). It only got halfway there at around 30-35% infected worldwide. And a flu vaccine hadn't been created yet. But what you did have is that on top of people who got sick and recovered and became immune, social controls were in place. People wore masks. Behaviors shifted for a time, heading into April of 1920. And I believe what happened was that it was just enough to take the R0 below 1 for long enough that it mutated into a form that was more transmissible, but coincided with lower lethality. Flu's genetic volatility allowed it to escape like this with an ever decreasing number of active infections.

SARS-CoV-2 doesn't really have that level of constraint. It spreads far more easily in warm, humid weather than flu does. But again, its genetically far more stable than flu is. The variant problem in the future won't be nearly as bad as it seems now as long as the effort to track its genetic drift remains strong and vaccinations are applied to defend against them as soon as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that it will take a concerted vaccination and monitoring campaign to actually eradicate it. But I certainly think it's possible. I think the biggest threat to this is the potential for a very similar coronavirus jumping back out from an animal reservoir, maybe akin to whatever the original source was for SARS-CoV-2.

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Essy

I'm not totally convinced that COVID is here forever. Yes we have several identified variants right now but only a couple of them have shown any evasion of antibody neutralization. And none of them have evaded them completely. On top of that you have memory T and B cells which could further protect people from the severity and you still have a general reduction of viral loads, and therefore lower reproduction numbers, caused by these other actors of the adaptive immune system.

On top of this, it doesn't mutate nearly as easily as influenza does. We've seen these variants but those variants exist because of the sheer number of people infected at a given time versus what exists in a typical season for influenza. I firmly believe that with some vigilance and a period of a few waves of vaccinations, it may be eradicated after a decade. That's still a decent length of time, but it isn't forever.

On the issue of mask wearing, I expect medical facilities will keep the policies around. It's honestly not a bad idea even if you were just protecting against the flu. Maybe also with public transportation as well during the winter. But for the rest of the general public? I doubt they'll return even in the winter unless we draw some massively unlucky card with a new mutation somewhere down the road.

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Essy

swords

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Essy

Pink Gold Peach

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Essy

Birdo or Klonoa

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Essy

The Citadel has two arachnotrons, one directly in front of you at the start and another in the central courtyard on the platform with the red skull key. Otherwise it would be totally compatible with the original Doom so you could just replace them with barons of hell or whatever. Also replace the SSG with a plasma rifle. I like that only one of the keys is mandatory to exit, and overall layout is neat. But it's an odd level for sure. I actually love speedrunning it.

The Courtyard is another favorite of mine. I like waking up almost everything at once and creating a massive infight in the center while I just run around dodging for a while and punching the air.

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Essy

I love the hell out of Suburbs, definitely in my top 3 for Doom II. That fight/ambush after grabbing the blue key on the tower is so fun and the variety of weird, corrupted buildings makes a lasting impression.

The secret in Industrial Zone where you take a flying leap from the building to land on the platform with the switch is my favorite secret in the game, and fittingly enables access to the secret exit. Sadly both secret levels are kind of underwhelming gimmick maps. I like the joke that Nazis are in league with Hell, though!

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Essy

Plenty of restrictions have been lifting over the last week or so in many states, so we'll get a good view of if the R0 will remain under 1 despite that. Given general behaviors and practices that have been had all along, I suspect it won't change it that much but a number of places will definitely plateau or see a little bit of increased spread because of variant growth.

Also on the earlier topic, I shouldn't have been lazy on fact checking. China as an entity does not rank in the top 10 for worldwide contributors to the WHO, for combined assessed contributions (membership dues) and voluntary contributions (which is what CCP would fall under). Their voluntary contributions are quite minimal.

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Essy

I thought of diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs all simultaneously.

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Essy

And I never did get around to playing Ancient Aliens or Valiant but I'll get there eventually.

UAC Ultra though I got through a while back and absolutely love it. Hope you enjoy the rest of it.

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Essy

RadiantJoyrock posted...

A modern level would replace the chaingunner with an archvile in the center lol

Nah, the chaingunner would stay but the archvile would be embedded below to continually resurrect the chaingunner until you cross a linedef that would make the platform rise to finally reveal the archvile.

Also I really like 'O' of Destruction/Circle of Death for some reason even though the challenge is basically over after the opening fight to clear out the central room. I can't put my finger on exactly why except that it's the archvile's first appearance. The ambush on the raised platform leading to the exit is nice, too.

Sometimes I like The Factory. It depends on my mood.

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Essy

Okay.

Said another way, it doesn't make a difference if there was a "containment failure" or whatever at the lab since it was already in the community anyway. I'm still granting that there was misconduct by the CCP, which wasn't really part of this latest WHO evaluation about the lab in the first place. Their misconduct came later while community spread was happening.

The WHO's errors were born more out of a fallacious adherence to caution about global economic damages regarding sounding the alarm, with or without CCP influence. But it had already spread to a point then anyway (as evidenced by COVID positive patients in multiple countries from December and earlier) that the global fate was sealed.

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Essy

Barrels o' Fun is definitely one of the best. Lives up to its name and has a really satisfying infighting opportunity.

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Essy

The WHO reiterated their belief that coronavirus was of animal origin, and I continue to agree with that assessment. The epidemiology research lab in Wuhan was probably aware of things before anyone else, but I don't think a containment breach or anything like that was responsible for anything. It would be like blaming the laboratories monitoring and sequencing the genetic code of the variants in the UK or South Africa for those variants now circulating.

However ever since Denmark's fiasco with a mutated variant from minks, my own suspicion is that China's fur farms are the most likely point of origin.

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Essy

I'm still using a Logitech M510 that I got well over a decade ago.

Though the middle/wheel click has become a little unreliable. I've probably needed to replace it for about a year now.

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Essy

I basically agree so far, except to bump up 05 a little. The plasma gun secret definitely sets the tone for some of the later bizarre secrets the game has in store.

On the whole I like Doom II quite a bit more than the original. The new enemies make it more fun (even the pain elemental imo), the maps in general are more open and feel more fast-paced in large part to the SSG. Also greater BFG opportunities and more rocket use. Music is the only thing I may like a little better about the original.

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Essy

Yeah, reimagining the map sounds like it could be fun. I've seen a few projects float around for remaking or reimagining the id maps in general but I never did play any of them. Maybe I should circle back on that.

I know I've played a few maps inspired by Limbo that were done extremely well, but I don't remember which megawads they were from at this point. Most of my Doom playing was from like 2010-2014. I think Limbo can also be blamed for the lineage of level design that created two very infamous ones: Eternal Doom's MAP12: Darkdome and Epic 2's MAP28: Ogdoad.

Both are insanely sprawling key hunts that took me over an hour to complete when I did them blind. I enjoyed them both, but I'm obviously pretty tolerant of that kind of thing.

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Essy

To randomly rank the final episode: 6 > 5 > 9 > 3 > 4 > 7 > 2 > 8 > 1

Visually Gate to Limbo is a really cool level, possibly my favorite in the whole game visually, and the general impression I get from that design makes me forgive some of the awfulness of forcing you to solve a puzzle across a damaging floor. At least more than I should. If you learn the puzzle it isn't too bad, but it's totally fair to judge it on a blind/unfamiliar run.

Totally agreed on Erebus. Just an all around great level and there seems to be solid consensus on its greatness.

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Essy

My favorite was this stuffed kitten, but one day my dog ripped its face off.

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Essy

Yes, for two reasons: Higher viral load identified in the upper respiratory tracts from people infected by either of the two and the fact that both variants have growing proportions of all samples that are sequenced, or have outright become the dominant variant, in the places where they have been identified.

I believe the UK variant is the more contagious of the two, but it still gets neutralized nearly as well by vaccines as the original variant. The SA variant isn't neutralized as readily, but the R0 for it would undoubtedly still be smashed down enough with mass vaccination to allow a booster to be made available specifically for it. And the vaccines still seem to prevent death and hospitalizations from the SA variant.

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Essy

https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/04/johnson-johnson-submits-application-for-covid-19-vaccine-to-fda

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Essy

Yes

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Essy

Nah, new cases and hospitalizations are declining or holding steady in every state right now.


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Essy

The US will "only" be adding a five digit number of cases on the weekend updates this week, I suspect. That would make it the first since November 3rd.

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Essy