igor67

I loathe crypto because it tried to argue it was the next great thing in tech without any actual use, and has now backtracked at best to accepting that its a pure electronic creation to be traded for the sake of trading. The pattern of moving goalposts around its existence is unsettling at best and when you uncover the older hacks to manipulate the blockchain part itself? So far hiding assets is the only understandable problem I've seen it solve, and if that's your problem well I'm not terribly sympathetic.

I was saying 'Yeah Burnes'

Where has this Shelby Miller been over the years?

Early in trials they will tend to pause for any rare event occurring while they try and establish the cause and if it is plausibly related to the trial in question or something else. Roughly speaking the idea there is that the chances of some kind of rare event early in a trial while the sample is small are relatively low. By the end of a trial though a single rare event does not have any real predictive power.

I don't have a ton to add, other than this seems to be the system working to be vigilant for possible rare complications. Given the current reported frequency though I don't believe any of this would have been noticed in a more normal trial situation. Trials get into the tens of thousands normally, but that isn't going to give you any statistical power to notice 1 in a million type events. I will say that my quick look at some literature did not list clotting as a know potential side effect for adenovirus based vaccines.

There are quite a few different hesitant communities, the trendlines that I have generally seen are that traditional minority communities have become noticeably less hesitant over the last couple of months, but other populations have changed less. Looking at who has gotten the shots is somewhat misleading because the initial prioritization groups were heavily biased away from Black and Hispanic populations. In MN there is a 10% point difference in the vaccine rate in favor of women vs. men for exactly the same reason. A month ago the percentage gap was about the same and meant that about twice as many women as men had gotten the shot! WI's prioritization was similar with healthcare workers and older citizens. I don't have the break down for Wisconsin, but healthcare positions typically require college degrees which all but guarantees a smaller proportion of Black and Hispanic people were eligible, and since both also have noticeably lower life expectancies you would see a similar bias very specifically towards white women. MN breaks the data down enough into both age groups and ethnicities https://mn.gov/covid19/vaccine/data/index.jsp So you can see that for the oldest populations the vaccination percentages track the different ethnic groups quite closely, and it is only in the younger age groups you see bigger differences consistent with most of the vaccinated people in those categories having been teachers and healthcare workers. It will take awhile for those numbers to even out. There is a lot of literature on vaccine hesitancy that predates the pandemic. One of the most effective things in getting people to take vaccines, is just sharing positive experiences and positive reasons for getting the vaccine with family and friends. While there are documentable biases in vaccine attitudes across the political spectrum, it isn't super dramatic. The reasons that people are inclined to be cautious about the Covid vaccine are even more diverse than other vaccines and there isn't anything close to a single best approach to convincing people. The opposite is actually true that anti-vaccine groups will opportunistically latch onto any argument that seems to be compelling to people.

All the numbers are soft enough that I don't want to try and do a quick analysis and convey any kind of false certainty, but if we can get to that 80-90% total population vaccinated number I ultimately don't think its a big deal. 1) the number of breakthrough events in total seems roughly similar to what we are seeing in the US, and generally in line with the high report efficacy. 2) because the efficacy is so high a relatively small decrease in efficacy for the South African variant you would expect it to make-up a high fraction of the observed breakthrough cases. My bigger concern at the moment would be that the variant is closer to be a real problem, and the longer it can hang around the possibility that it is the mutational jumping off point for something that the vaccine really can't handle is out there (but almost impossible to quantify). On the plus side I was excited that Pfizer had enough data to start the process of requesting expanding vaccine access down to 12 year olds particularly as the B117 strain seems to spread among them a lot better.

It is fun watching the other team flail at junk 4 pitches in a row.

Burnes, Woodruff, and Degrom are all jealous of Houser right now

I think it is worth recognizing how unprecedented managing pitching is this season. I was double checking the 94 strike and teams still got in over 110 games before the strike (so pretty close to a full AAA season) followed by a 144 game schedule in 95. I'm a little more skeptical of the universality of the 30 inning increase 'rule' for pitchers, but our starters are all young and going from a 60 game schedule to 162 is more than enough to give pause to any certainty in what the best strategy is. I would guess the Brewers tried to look at how individual pitchers in the past have handled big jumps in innings and are somehow incorporating that for the entire staff, but even a lot of data on individual pitcher seasons is different from the whole staff all at once.

Well we keep flirting, so why not no hit the Cards on their home opener.

It's not really a problem you can tackle head on though.

Materials shortages are also having an impact both due to shipping and factory disruptions as well as rapid changes in demand. I'm racing to get a window estimate because they are adding a surcharge Friday to their prices and they already are saying the windows wouldn't be available until July.

The Hiura clothesline highlight of the game so far.

1-0 always more fun than 0-1

Given expanded eligibility, I would be very OK for teams to start organizing employer wide vaccine events. It is very consistent with how other industries are acting if you are including all the stadium workers along with the players.

I got my second shot Saturday, no side effects beside normal range arm pain for an injection. So suffering is not a guarantee.

Lot's of good stuff posted so far, but the rise is also being impacted by more infectious variants becoming more common. This possibility was predicted a month plus back in time as a significant risk as well. In general the transmission kinetics (speed) are also nonlinear, so the biggest impact on rate is going to happen as we get closer to the herd immunity bar (which is also higher now with the more transmissible variants). There is also the importance of the two weeks for the immunity to kick in fully. So the current MN risk is (and WI seems pretty close in the numbers I've seen) is based on more like only 20% with 1 dose and 10% with both. On the plus side those numbers are on track to improve significantly over the next month or so.

Early 40's and I don't own a smartphone. 1) They are awkward and bulky. 2) Up to now everything I've wanted to do is easier on an actual computer. I'm competent enough to teach myself a couple of programming languages. 3) I am anti-techie because too much tech is at best marginal improvements and people forget to account for the time to learn new tech and weigh that against not only the expense of the tech, but also again those marginal productivity improvements. I had been thinking I might actually be able to catch an in person game this year after not for quite awhile, but this does put a damper on it. As a bonus I can still navigate with an actual map fairly well because I don't rely solely on GPS systems.

I thought it was great after watching so many brickfests earlier in the year. If nothing else beating North Carolina helps ease the pain of the rest of the season.

It's probably safer to eat with a mask on though

For all kinds of reasons the distribution is going to hit the tipping point at different times. Here is one story and it gives an idea of what types of measures are being used to reach the harder to reach as well. https://www.yahoo.com/news/plenty-vaccines-not-enough-arms-121241240.html I don't now if any of the reservations in MN or WI have gotten that far, but I know Cook county in MN is almost to 50% of its entire population vaccinated (its quite small population wise).

A full accounting is challenging because of the moving target nature of the problem, but roughly deaths tended to lag infections by about 3 weeks. And it takes about 10 days post shot #2 for the full immunity. So today's death numbers reflect vaccination rates from mid February which was still relatively limited in the numbers for the oldest populations having been vaccinated. Of course shot number 1 also seems to provide some level of protection. The absolute numbers have certainly fallen, I feel like the number of deaths per new cases has also fallen, but I don't have a good source of day by day data at the moment to confirm that feeling.

Short message if you get to call make the appointment. Longer answer- The allotments are going up on a week to week basis, which continues to shift the slow step in the vaccination process from number of shots to number of man hours to administer. Having to call you back, and maintain a call back list takes manpower. Worse is that refusing the first call automatically puts you in the nebulous vaccine hesitant category. Because we already know that people end up in that group for a whole range of reasons it is reasonable to imagine that the follow-up to try and get a person signed up is going to involve targeted messaging and even more resources. Inevitably this slows things down, which with most of the oldest Americans vaccinated the risk of delays is comparable to tracking down 1 higher risk individual. Worse if you start to think really big picture, the sooner most Americans have been vaccinated the sooner those doses can start going to other parts of the world. One could think about this as an American life vs. someone else but the long term risk of new variants and tamping down infection everywhere is so much greater than anything else.

Super excited to see MN is moving to really start opening up the shot for people farther down the priority list tomorrow. Opening it up before you get to close to exhausting the last category (most educators and almost 70% of 65+ have been vaccinated already) keeps the shots moving into people as fast as possible. The closer you get to 100% the harder it is to find and convince folks to get the vaccine. The faster we get that vaccine percentage higher the sooner we can enjoy big get togethers.