I'm wondering how people are getting it right now?

Is it happening at work?

Is it from their families?

Is the person working at CVS or McDonalds getting COVID more than someone telecommuting? (I think health care workers aren't a part of this - we know how they get it at work.)

Are they getting it wearing masks? If so, is it because the masks don't work 100% of the time (like a condom) or is it because they take the mask off because it's uncomfortable sometimes (like a condom?)

Or are the vast majority of folks just not wearing masks and getting it?

I really don't understand it right now.

and hanging out socially
13 members of my friends family caught it
at a graduation party over the summer
one person knew their mother had been sick
and still had the party
and got everyone else sick
people don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves

At least not the simple types that most people wear. They're mainly intended to reduce the amount of virus expelled by the wearer, reducing chances of infecting others. How well they do this is still a matter of scientific debate.

I don't know the numbers for the US, but my country (Netherlands) and the rest of the EU are knee deep in the second wave and most spread seems to be associated with private occasions (birthdays, bbqs, funerals, etc.) and work.
So yes, people who can't work from home are at a higher risk. Especially because they tend to work in industries with suboptimal conditions. The meat processing industry saw a lot of outbreaks, for example.

Bars and restaurants seemed to have a relatively modest part in the spread during the time where they were allowed to open (shut down right now), probably thanks to most of them adhering to rules and guidelines (limited admission, no dancing or singing, distancing).

Teachers are seeing a relatively high number of positive tests, so while children and teens are at low risk of getting ill, they're probably an important vector for spreading the virus.

Does the CDC still publish numbers? Is there something like a dashboard or flowchart for the public? Like https://coronadashboard.government.nl/ for example? My government handled it far from ideal, but at least they're still engaged, can't imagine how anxiety-inducing the total lack of oversight must be for people in the US.

(chances are some of the info I have is already outdated, so I hope people feel free to fact-check me)

But I'm not aware of an official government representation, maybe just because the NYT portal was front page in the A column pretty much from Day One so it's been the one I check every morning and night.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

NYT data journalists must be working overtime for this.

Those early spikes in cases and deaths in big metro areas such as NY are quite something :(

Some breakouts and spreading on campus, and gotta think at least some of them are spreading it to others in those communities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/21/la-crosse-wisconsin-covid-outbreak-nursing-home-deaths/

By
Juliet Eilperin,
Brady Dennis and
Chris Mooney
Oct. 21, 2020 at 6:05 p.m. EDT

After a college town’s coronavirus outbreak, deaths at nursing homes mount

‘The very thing we worried about’: In La Crosse, Wis., students partied in September. Then infections and deaths among the elderly began to rise.

Mayor Tim Kabat was already on edge as thousands of students returned to La Crosse, Wis., to resume classes this fall at the city’s three colleges. When he saw young people packing downtown bars and restaurants in September, crowded closely and often unmasked, the longtime mayor’s worry turned to dread.

Now, more than a month later, La Crosse has endured a devastating spike in coronavirus cases — a wildfire of infection that first appeared predominantly in the student-age population, spread throughout the community and ultimately ravaged elderly residents who had previously managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic.

For most of 2020, La Crosse’s nursing homes had lost no one to covid-19. In recent weeks, the county has recorded 19 deaths, most of them in long-term care facilities. Everyone who died was over 60. Fifteen of the victims were 80 or older. The spike offers a vivid illustration of the perils of pushing a herd-immunity strategy, as infections among younger people can fuel broader community outbreaks that ultimately kill some of the most vulnerable residents.

“It was the very thing we worried about, and it has happened,” Kabat said.

Local efforts to contain the outbreak have been hamstrung by a statewide campaign to block public health measures, including mask requirements and limits on taverns, he added. “Your first responsibility as a local government is really to protect the health and safety and welfare of your residents,” he said. “When you feel like that’s not happening and you have few tools or resources available to change that, it’s more than frustrating.”

As the number of coronavirus infections continues to soar in the upper Midwest, few places embody the nation’s divisions over how to tackle the pandemic better than Wisconsin. Even as the state’s weekly caseload has quadrupled in the past six weeks, bar owners and Republicans have thwarted some restrictions on public indoor gatherings, leaving public health professionals scrambling to contain the virus.

Wisconsin ranks fourth among states in daily reported cases per capita, with 59 per 100,000 residents. According to The Washington Post’s analysis of state health data, in the past week new daily reported cases have gone up more than 20 percent, hospitalizations have increased more than 26 percent and daily reported deaths have risen 22 percent.

In recent briefings, Wisconsin health secretary designee Andrea Palm said the state is doing worse than it was in March and April and has pleaded with residents to avoid going to bars and to practice social distancing.

“Wisconsin is in crisis, and we need to take this seriously,” Palm said last week.

Last week a judge in Wisconsin’s Sawyer County temporarily blocked an order from Gov. Tony Evers (D) limiting crowds in bars, restaurants and other indoor spaces to 25 percent of capacity, though a judge in Barron County reinstated it Tuesday. The Tavern League of Wisconsin, which represents the state’s bars, argued it amounted to a “de facto closure.” In May, the state Supreme Court struck down Evers’s “Safer at Home” order after Republican lawmakers challenged it, and a conservative activist has just sued to block Wisconsin’s statewide mask mandate.

Elizabeth Cogbill, who specializes in geriatrics and internal medicine in the Gundersen Health System, has been working 14-hour days since the pandemic began, staying late to talk to families who can no longer visit their elderly relatives.

Since June, Cogbill has been working with the county, other medical professionals and nursing home officials to curb coronavirus infections. They had managed to stifle several flare-ups without a death, until September.

In an interview, the 41-year-old doctor said that as the number of infections among young people began to rise six weeks ago, “I had this feeling of just terror.” She had watched similar community outbreaks throughout the country migrate from younger to older populations and hoped the same tragedy would not unfold in La Crosse. But it did.

“These are my people. These are my patients,” she said. “It entered our facilities and it just spread like wildfire. … I don’t have words to describe this experience.”

Recent data released by Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows that weekly cases in nursing homes rose nationwide in late September as the disease became more widespread in 38 states and the country entered its third coronavirus spike. That marked the first uptick in seven weeks in long-term care, after new cases dropped throughout August and early September.

To Paraic Kenny, a La Crosse-based cancer geneticist at the Kabara Cancer Research Institute who has turned to genetic sequencing to track the coronavirus, the nursing home deaths are a corollary of bringing students back to campus and allowing a party culture to reignite.

“Completely, completely, completely predictable,” said Kenny, who said he saw over 13 “overflowing” parties on a late-September drive home from work that took him through neighborhoods where many students live. “Everything we’ve known about this virus since January, everything we’ve known about 20-year-olds for the last 3,000 years — it’s predictable.”

In a new study that has not yet been formally peer-reviewed, Kenny found genetic links between a number of nursing home covid-19 cases — including several deaths — and large outbreaks in the local student population. Because the coronavirus mutates roughly twice a month, scientists decoding its evolution can construct detailed family trees that track the virus’s spread from one person to the next.

“Risks of rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 among college-age individuals are not limited to college environs but pose a direct threat to older persons in the surrounding community,” the study states.

In addition to the genetic connections, Kenny noted that the large outbreak in the student population came first.

Several other researchers who read the paper cautioned that while students certainly could have fueled cases among vulnerable elderly residents, genetics in isolation cannot definitively prove that link. For instance, saying that two cases are genetically related or even identical does not necessarily prove who infected whom; it is also possible that a third party, perhaps one whose virus genome was never sampled by researchers, infected both separately.

Thomas Friedrich, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has done extensive genetic sequencing of the coronavirus, said that the only way to get more precise would be to conduct additional contact tracing or epidemiological investigations.

In an email, he compared the outbreak among college students to “a large fire, which can throw off sparks that start additional fires.” He added that “high levels of transmission among students in La Crosse absolutely increased the risk of outbreaks in skilled nursing facilities. data are totally consistent with this scenario, but they do not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that specific viruses traveled from students to nursing home residents.”

Which is odd to me because other than wearing masks inside, it’s back to relatively normal service around here. Clubs are still closed but everything else is open. So I’m wondering how tf ppl are getting it. Or is it just completely missing my the folks in my world

you basically get major white house style super spread events, that then spread to their homes, workplaces, etc.

People without masks and not social distancing?

apparently there are certain people who are just more prone to spread the virus as well. shit is weird and crazy.

Mainly focusing on the K number, which is basically a measure of whether the virus spreads steadily or with big jumps (i.e. superspreading events). The K number hasn't been reported on as much as R (average number of transmissions from one infected person), but looks to be very important in understanding Sars-CoV-2 spread.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/01/k-number-what-is-coronavirus-metric-crucial-lockdown-eases

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13689.pdf

This is not meant to be scientific at all, but rather my current intuition after months of hoovering up info because it's interesting to me and helps me to navigate society during the pandemic.

Basically, I think the reason most people here know relatively few infected people is because OKP's are largely middle class, democrat-leaning and with young children.

- A lot of the big clusters occur in lower-income workplaces such as meatpacking plants, care centers and prisons. Impossible to work from home, hard to keep distance (especially if you use mass transit or shuttle services to go there), poor ventilation, etc.
So unless you work in a place like this, or know many people that do, chances are you're not going to see many infections around you.

- With the highly politicized nature of the pandemic response in the US, I think it's safe to say that democrats will practice more distancing and mask-wearing than republicans, leaving the latter at higher risk of getting it. So unless you know a ton of republicans, many infections will stay under your radar.

- Young children seem to play a rather small role in spreading the disease, teenagers and young adults are a bigger factor. So if you have young children or no children at all, that's another sizeable part of the population you're not hearing from directly.

- And finally, most of us are approaching middle age and don't have as many differing social contacts as an average person in their twenties. Boring = safe :/

who is in the Army and had training with hundreds of soldiers over a weekend.

My wife has a coworker who’s husband got it because they had a get together and he kept taking his mask off.

I have a friend or 2 who keep trying to have social events for some odd reason. One called up and asked what we were doing for my bday. I’m thinking.. not a damn thing.

>One called up and asked what we were doing
>for my bday. I’m thinking.. not a damn thing.

Clubs. Bars. House parties. Baby showers. Weddings. Regular ass gatherings. People are OUT out

I had to re-read your post a couple times because the question genuinely seemed ignorant but maybe not.

>Clubs. Bars. House parties. Baby showers. Weddings. Regular
>ass gatherings. People are OUT out
>
>I had to re-read your post a couple times because the question
>genuinely seemed ignorant but maybe not.

*It's just inconceivable to me that a large number of people are just not wearing masks and not socially distancing when *it is* possible.*

I do know there are places where the density and risk are always going to be high - and that not everyone can avoid those risks. But it seems to me (who IS ignorant on how this all actually works - I'm not a public health professional) that the rise can't be explained by this subset of people.

It seems from the responses here that a large part of the rise may be people simply taking off masks and not socially distancing because they CHOOSE not to.

imagine how FUCKED we would be with something like that.

you would have people straight up denying the severity of it the same way people are acting towards covid.