Slate Star Codex has a long an interesting article on -- yes, wait for it -- ivermectin. He looks carefully at every study he can find on it, throws a bunch out for various obvious and not-so-obvious flaws, analyzes what remains and concludes that worms plausibly make covid cases worse, and so taking ivermectin can plausibly have a positive impact for those with worm infestations. Thus if you're living in Bangladesh, ivermectin may help you with covid by killing the worms that worsen your case. But not in relatively wormless places like USA#9.

Certainly an interesting thesis.

Scott Alexander, who now writes that blog on Substack, is verbose but often very perceptive.

Living in SEA I'd say there is a good chance I have worms so probably can't hurt!

New Variant in Germany?

Or maybe its just cold.

It is having a simply horrifying explosion in cases and is well past previous peaks.

Previous peak 307 CPM
Current peak 518 CPM

This is in a country with 67% fully vaccinated.

Seems like moron Twitter is also posting a lot about new lockdowns in places with extremely high vaxx rates like Gibraltar and Ireland.

Thisisfinedog.jpg

I just found out that my stepdad ordered ivermectin from Canada, and he and my mom (a retired nurse) have taken it.

So, that's fun.

As a preventative or because they have covid?

Edit: or they think they have worms?

Were his local feed store and co-op both out of it?

Ugh!

Got my booster and a flu shot last week, nothing much but a sore arm for a couple days

Buckle up, Twitter going berserk about Nu variant.

And stock market tanking because of it. Appears to be more contagious and more vaccine resistant. I guess the amount of vaccine resistance is the question. Get your boosters.

Nobody knows if it's vaccine-resistant or not. South Africa is only 25-35% vaccinated.

Ignore twitter doomsayers like Eric Feigl Ding who turn any uncertainty into sky is falling.

If suzzer isn't freaking out, I'm not freaking out.

Getting my booster next week, but that was always the plan.

Flu shot scheduled this AM. While checking in, mentioned to the tech that website wouldn't let me sign up for covid booster, but I was eligible.

They were able to hook me up. Moderna this time, originally Pfizer. Between that cross & the 2-for-1 today, eagerly anticipating mutations. Hope they're good ones.

There's uncertainty. And a chance this could be really bad. But some corners of twitter are doing their usual thing and turning "we don't know if this is mutated enough to escape vaccines" into "this new variant could render vaccines useless" - as if we already know it escapes vaccines, we just don't know how much. Which is wrong. But it makes for scary clickable headlines.

Same with whether is variant is more or less likely to lead to hospitalization or death. No one knows since it's so new. But there's no reason yet to think it's going to be more dangerous.

UK government dragged its feet for months before belatedly banning flights from India due to Delta.

The fact that it has insta banned travel from SA et al and the FTSE dropped nearly 4% on news of Omicron, leads me to suspect that Omicron is being taking fekin seriously by informed technocrats who are at the head of the information que.

One known is that the R is 2 in areas of SA where Omnicron is now the dominant strain. That is a massive number given spread in a community with previous high levels of infection and at least some vaccination.

I came into this thread after a nice long break looking for this as well. Getting boosted next week

A case of Omicron has been found in Belgium. The individual carrying the virus has not been to SA or knows anyone who has.

Very unlikely to be of serious concern to vaccinated people, especially if boosted.

Feigl-Ding seems like a chump.

11 day incubation period from leaving Egypt to symptoms showing up. Going to guess they caught it in Belgium.
If not and this thing now has a 10 day incubation period we're ****ed.

lol at "we're ****ed" from ONE instance of a CASE

I think I just saw NYC shut down elective surgery because of the NEW VARIANT. Lol we clown world now.