Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Major League Baseball and the players’ association stopped blood testing for Human Growth Hormone because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Blood testing for HGH began in 2012, and 412 samples with no positive results were collected in the year ending with the 2020 World Series. MLB and the union never publicly announced the stoppage in blood testing but its absence was revealed Monday when Thomas M. Martin, the independent administrator of the joint drug program, released his annual report.
The decision to interrupt blood testing during the pandemic was made because drawing blood is more invasive than urine testing and requires additional collectors who would have increased the number of people coming into contact with players and decreased social distancing. MLB and the union plan to resume blood testing next season.
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In that context, I don't see the problem with not testing for HGH.
(AND YES, I REALIZE THAT THERE MAY BE PRIVATE LABS WHICH COULD DO HGH TESTING THAT WERE NOT DOING COVID TESTING, ETC., ETC., BUT STILL, REASONABLE PEOPLE WOULD RATHER THAT THOSE RESOURCES BE USED TO DEAL WITH THE TESTING REQUIREMENTS OF THE PANDEMIC).
https://nypost.com/2021/11/29/biden-fauci-repeatedly-mispronounce-new-omicron-covid-variant/amp/
Proof of vaccination now required in Canada if you want to fly or use a train. A clean PCR is no longer an acceptable substitute.
No idea how this will affect cross border sports.
Isn't that the evil corporation in the RoboCop movies?
Remember, anti-vaxxers are just Deeply Misunderstood, and their choices don't affect anyone else anyway.
You can see the new predictions for Europe here, where the old predictions had almost all countries peaking right around now. By the way, predicting peaks now is very bold and counterintuitive, considering the meat of winter won't hit for a few weeks more, so it's not like this was an easy mistake to make.
Alternatively, maybe the Economist's excess death numbers are off, or South Africa's health care system is worse than ours, and thus you'd expect the fatality rate to be higher there. Or all of the above. Each one of those estimates/calculations is subject to various sources of error, and when you compound them, maybe "80%" is really more like "50-90%".
I can't remember what organization it was that predicted a couple of months ago that cases in the US were just going to keep declining through March...
The fact that the virus is "already here" is not the only factor. It takes time to spread, and the more sources it has the more quickly it spreads. This thread from Trevor Bedford estimates that we are maybe 8 weeks from being where South Africa is now. Delaying the spread here such that we don't have massive community infection for another few weeks could save 10s of thousands of lives, and potentially much more than that. We really don't know yet.
So, we're not going to be containing the spread, then.
The American battle cry, to paraphrase Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: "I will not be inconvenienced!"
I have 3 company holiday parties on three straight days, in 2 weeks, just days before I'm scheduled to fly to my elderly parents' house for the holidays. I think I will likely skip the parties.
Still no real word yet as to how much protection existing vaccines give against infection and against serious disease, and if omicron on its own is more or less deadly than delta, once you catch it.
EDIT: Also, Norway reports 50+ omicron COVID-19 cases linked to company Christmas party
Germany's dealing with a major geographical split at the moment - the current surge is highly weighted towards the south and east, with Saxony being a particular hotbed. Merkel is also on her way out, after (I think) 16 long years as Chancellor. As an East German herself, I'm sort of hoping that she's able to work on eroding vaccine hesitancy over there once she's out of the partisan game.
She's also leaving her successor, from a competing political party, to have to actually implement any future mandate. That's probably canny. Booster jabs are not yet being widely rolled out for the under-60s yet, but hopefully that day is coming soon.
The nobel laureate covid kook is Michael Levitt.
That is depressing news. If Omnicron means starting over.... that sucks.
I've seen some early claims that vaccinations seem to provide some protection against Omnicron. I hope that is true.
It's not *good* news, but the technology and infrastructure are now there to update and distribute the vaccines relatively quickly, so at least we won't be back to March 2020, even as a worst-case scenario.
Problem is that there is next to no appetite for mitigation measures, so controlling the spread until an omicron-specific vaccine is available is pretty much a non-starter.
In VA I dont think they have mask restrictions. In upstate NY I dont see many people wearing them. I havent been to CT in a few weeks but I was under the impression it was maybe 50 50.
Too early to celebrate about Omicron though as milder than delta. There are a myriad of articles saying no hospitalizations and deaths from Omicron, but someone is in the hospital in Gauteng, and not all the cases can be very mild. Hospital admissions have risen from 144 to 1702 in 3 weeks, more than doubling each week for 3 straight weeks. Too early to say if deaths are rising, but you'll notice they almost doubled in Gauteng in the last week after being very low for 4 straight weeks. Could be noise, or could be to more testing, but f they double again this week that will be a pretty bad sign.
TL; DR: He thinks Omicron spreads much faster than Delta, probably isn't more deadly and may or may not be less deadly, is much more likely to reinfect/breakthrough than Delta (meaning that cases on average will be less dangerous because reinfections/breakthroughs should on average be less deadly than initial infections, and Omicron will have many more of those than Delta).
He also thinks Q1 2022 may be a bad time to need to visit a hospital in many countries, given where we are now and the material number of vaccine refusal cases in many Western countries. (I'd also note flu season on top of that). There's just only so much capacity of hospitals and, more critically, staff to manage a surge in need in most countries, even if survival rates would ordinarily be high.
And, yet again, we'll know a lot more in the next week. But he's saying that based on what we know now, there's going to be a very large number of Omicron cases before a targeted vaccine becomes available, because it just spreads that fast.
An odd one - a variant of Covid, which looks a lot like Omicron, and is detected as Covid by PCR tests, but lacks the feature used to identify the infection specifically as Omicron. Meaning that presumably it would get recorded as Delta in most tests.
Lends credence to the idea that Omicron is probably well into community spread in many regions. Possibly good news if hospitalisation rates are not skyrocketing in countries where vaccination and previous infections are high? It would hint that, even if Omicron-family variants spread quickly and reinfect/breakthrough vaccinations, they may not endanger health in the same way when they do.
An expert might be able to comment on whether an Omicron variant which isn't detectable in the same way actually needs a new designation.
There's still a lot we don't know, but "get the booster" is the best action anyone can take right now.
The Maryland Health Department was hacked the other day, and we haven't been able to get statewide Covid updates since Sunday.
No word on who was behind the hack.
this gets to how communities have their own subcommunities/cultures, no?
i'm in the western part of cary nc, in an intensely upper middle class zipcode*, itself part of a relatively well-to-do suburb. anyway, if i go to the grocery store - pretty much everyone will be wearing masks, though the town dropped its mandate a few weeks back. but when i went to the hardware store on the other side of town, the mask wearers were pretty much me and the employees. same city, but totally different behaviors.
* highest median income zip in the state but nowhere near the highest mean income - lots of people with grad degrees and professional/managerial careers, additionally it's about one-third asian (largely south asian).
also - remember when we discussed more anodyne stuff like how zipcodes weren't geographic areas and whatnot? good times.
England has re-implemented mask mandates, work-from-home instructions, and some vaccine passport measures for large events, after a few months of slapping themselves on the back for not having them while Scotland and Wales maintained them. The timing is unhealthy: coming in the middle of a scandal where repeated parties in December 2020 by senior government and Conservative party individuals are coming to light while lockdown was in place. Resulting in both a political squeeze on the government from its own backbenchers, and a strong whiff of hypocrisy detected by the wider public.
Oh! And I read a fun theory on the ivermectin silliness; while most of the studies showing positive effects turn out to be incoherent, fraudulent, or both, a mild positive effect in some countries does have a plausible explanation: ivermectin actually does help deworm humans, and a human no longer suffering from undiagnosed parasitic worms will be more likely to recover from Covid than one who keeps them along for the ride.
Two huge reasons why it's way too early to tell if Omicron is less virulent "in the wild". One is the age profile in South Africa of current cases and hospitalizations, which skew much younger than delta (and it's not particularly close), and the second is prior infection and vaccination, from which the South African population has way more coverage than they did in the early days of delta.
It's very likely now that this omicron wave is going to be less devastating to South Africa than the recent delta wave, but that doesn't tell us much about which is more virulent absent vaccination or prior infection (or recent vaccination or recent prior infection).
The number of people in ICU and ventilated have more than doubled in the last week in Guateng, though are still at a low number in comparison to the delta wave. (Deaths too have more than doubled in Gauteng, so when you hear the statement that "no one has died from omicron" you can be virtually positive that it's wrong.)
I don't know him. He and I have never met. My wife's side of the family on my coast is debating whether or not to fly cross country from California to Virginia for his funeral, which would effectively blow up our Christmas plans. I wonder how many thousands of times families across the country have had to deal with this stupid, stupid, stupid bullsh!t, and how many more times this will have to happen.
Can you explain the logic here? Because I've seen this repeated in any number of stories and I dont see how that's so obvious: two vaccines: no good; two + infection: good; therefore booster = good.
How do this reasoning work?
This get me every time. And reminds me that I'm currently underinsured for what my family would need.
Its early enough in the analysis that it seems like most of the analysis is either extrapolation from small sample sizes (about to change) or out-right guesses...pretty much the thought process seems to be more exposures = better than fewer.
It's going from bad to worse in Michigan.
Antivaxxers and their enablers have a large share of responsibility for a lot of unnecessary deaths. When are we going to stop coddling them?
I used to lurk and occasionally comment from 2014-2016 when there was a weekly OTP thread.
This is my first time back visiting the BTF site in almost 5 years.
Did BTF at some point in the last 5 years decide not to have a (non-Covid) OTP thread? Or did the desire to talk politics here just gradually die out on its own?
Just curious (as someone who was here, then not, but now popping back in) how this issue evolved over the last 5 years, especially with how tumultuous those 5 years have been politically.
If you ignore Covid, it will go away!
We have some real cretinous brutes in positions of power in this country.
Thank you, but the link in the other thread was to this page, not Discord. Does anyone have the link to the specific page (Group? Thread? Place?) on Discord this discussion migrated to? If someone provides that, I promise this will be my last question here on this.
We're not coddling them, they're in power, as you post in #60.
Thank you for the explanation.
And, IMO, the site is better for it.
I can see how that would be the case for those not interested in participating in such discussion.
Try this.
Will work for an hour.
dude
i am SO sorry.
i hope your wife decides she doesn't think destroying yalls holiday over someone like him is worth it.
- theres thousands and thousands more just like him - think they're immune to everything and they know everything and why think about the real future if something happens. same ones who clog up the hospitals and insist they don't really have covid or some bullspit
i am always surprised how many people refuse to get life insurance for their supposedly loved ones. the excuse i hear is always the same - i'm not gonna die so there's nothing to worry about
No excerpts. No editorializing.
Anyway, I've got my booster booked, and am greatly looking forward to feeling like garbage the day after getting it, as with the last two shots.
Our intrepid nobel laureate (Levitt) still claims delta is milder than the original virus, for exactly this reason, because it has caused way fewer serious illnesses in deaths in Western Europe than the original virus did. It's the same mistake.
Of course, omicron might actually end up being milder intrinsically, but we really don't have any data that shows this is true yet.
Was Delta shown to be more deadly than prior strains, or was it just more contagious? (I assume the answer is we don’t *really* know, but maybe there is some general sense.)
At any rate, we should have good data from other places soon. Denmark (and Norway), especially, where not that many people actually ever had covid before but there is a high rate of vaccination, AND delta and omicron are hitting at the same time, so we should be able to directly compare the two, especially since we will for the most part have good data on how many infections for each are breakthrough infections. There are fewer confounding variables in Denmark/Norway.
link
I felt a little wonky for much of the next day, but that was a major upgrade from how I felt after the first two.
Reported omicron cases are now doubling every 3 days in Denmark or so, and it's slowing down quickly.
The UK just had 78,000 cases reported today, the most ever. They aren't as clean a laboratory as Norway/Denmark, since delta has been rampant in UK for a while. Still we should be getting a feel for how serious the effects of omicron are in the UK, but we might have to wait until early January.
from yahoo:
"Billy Gardner and Marm Kilpatrick from the University of California, Santa Cruz developed computer models incorporating data on COVID-19 vaccines' efficacy against earlier variants and initial data on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against Omicron. Their models suggest that early after two doses of an mRNA vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna, efficacy against symptomatic infection from Omicron is only about 30%, down from about 87% versus Delta, they reported on Sunday on medRxiv https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.10.21267594v2 ahead of peer review. Protection against symptomatic infection is "essentially eliminated" for individuals vaccinated more than four months earlier. Boosters restore protection to about 48%, "which is similar to the protection of individuals with waned immunity against the Delta variant (43%)," Kilpatrick said.
"Importantly, protection against severe disease is much higher" for all categories: recently vaccinated, waned, or boosted. "We estimated that protection against severe disease was 86% for recent mRNA vaccination against Omicron, 67% for waned immunity, and 91% following 3rd dose boosters," Kilpatrick said. "There are still no direct estimates of vaccine effectiveness for severe disease from any country yet, so our estimates cannot be compared to direct estimates yet."
NOTHING about long covid
Press conference wrapped up an hour or so ago in the UK. Johnson strongly pushing the booster message, as he must, but the medical experts standing next to him seemed fairly resigned that they're looking at a winter that could be as bad, or worse, than the last one. Also some suggestions that there simply won't be sufficient tests soon enough, and that the turnaround time for getting results, in the face of Omicron's virulence, will be a real issue.
Also, Chris Witty suggested that those in the UK may want to think about cancelling social events except for 'the things that really matter to them' - adding a fun additional layer of passive aggressiveness to the existing minefield of British social interaction . . .
It's been two weeks since we've had the good, comprehensive data about Maryland we've become used to (still recovering from a system hack), but my ex who works for the state health department has told me hospitalizations in the state have been spiking up, and it's still mainly delta.
Link to npr article, with internal links to the researcher’s study results.
We would expect a larger percentage of these cases to be breakthrough (from vaccination) than was the case for delta, and we will also likely see a large number of reinfections for people that had delta over the last few months. As a result, even if omicron is just as virulent, we should see CFR go down since those with recent prior infections and/or vaccinations are expected to have lesser symptoms. The real question is whether hospitalizations, serious illnesses and deaths, as a share of the total population, will go up significantly now that omicron is infecting a lot of people.
Even in Denmark, where not that many people have ever had covid, reinfections appear to be soaring, so there's confounding data everywhere.
I find this disturbing, but—so, so unsurprising. I mean, “fuck the vulnerable” is more or less the national motto at this stage.
If long COVD turns out to be anything like what activists fear, it’s gonna be just unimaginably costly and destructive. But factoring it in changes the risk calculations completely. If I have a 5% chance of some kind of lifetime disability? No ####### WAY do I take that chance just to eat in some restaurant. And there’s not much good data, as far as I can tell. It’s unclear the extent to which severity of case is linked to likelihood and persistence of long term effects…
It's very early still, but it's not looking too promising in London right now. This isn't just a winter effect either, as the rest of England is not yet seeing a significant increase in hospitalizations.
The unvaccinated are still lambs to the slaughter.
It has been suggested that a lot of Covid vax resistance comes from a relative media blackout of what the disease itself constitutes. "Hey, 99% survival rate, what's everyone so worried about?"
Popular support of the Vietnam War began to erode when the graphic reality of war atrocities began to be consistently displayed to the public. We haven't had enough widely-circulated "images" of Covid to get a similar effect.
Heck, reading this makes me want to weld MY home shut.
You'd expect that alone to cut the observed severity of the disease very significantly, since people under 50 don't get seriously ill that often anyway. If you add on top of that recent prior infections, and since we know the denominator for omicron is much larger due to its breakthrough capabilities, we should be expecting a very significantly lower CFR even if virulence and age groups testing positive are unchanged. Hoe much lower is hard to say of course. Add in the fact that it has mostly hit a younger age group in South Africa so far, and it's really basically impossible to know yet whether it's less virulent.
Again, maybe it is less virulent, but people who are certain that it is are jumping the gun. Does it matter if it's less virulent, now that "all" of us are vaccinated? Yes, it still matters! There are multiple states right now that or near their record highs for reported deaths already, even including last winter, and we haven't hit the worst part of winter yet. Adding omicron on top of whatever else is going on with delta is a big problem, even if the severe case rates are relatively low due to vaccinations and prior infections.
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