You're making a lot of assumptions there. Is it "blue collar" to only have one working parent while the other takes care of the family? I would think most people would prefer that if they can make it work. I am a fairly well compensated software engineer and my wife stays home to take care of the kids because we can afford it, and many others that I work with do the same. It seems a bit silly to have her work just so that we can pay someone else to raise our children for us.
genuinely asking, how do we actually know the delta variant is real, and is the dominant variant causing the current cases?
do people actually get tested for specific variants, or is it just a generic covid test?
It depends where you live. The UK was an early[0] leader in sequencing a lot of their cases. They hit 600,000 sequenced cases in July[1].
That said, if you just want to know what proportion of the population has delta, you don't need to sequence that many cases. The point of sequencing a large fraction of cases is to catch emerging variants, that wouldn't be likely to be caught otherwise. But to know whether Delta is 30%, 50%, or 70% of cases, you just need a good random sample, not a particularly large one, and I imagine you can do that at the labs where the PCR tests are being run.
(at one point, I recall that the UK had a test that matched on three distinct sites on the virus, and they found that one of those sites would turn up negative for a particular variant, so they were able to use that as a proxy for the spread of the variant. I don't remember if that was Alpha or Delta though, and obviously it's no replacement for sequencing)
NZ had until recently sequenced 100% of its cases, and used that sequencing information to map person to person infection linkages. This included all of the people in the mandatory 2-week quarantine at the border. So in NZ, yes, every case was tested for specific variants. Delta does seem to be real.
Some small subset of COVID tests are sent to larger labs to perform a more detailed genetic test to determine specific variants. The prevalence of different variants within that set is extrapolated to the population of the region from which it originated.
If the lab finds that 87% of the samples from Adam's College are of the Omega Mu strain, then it's assumed 87% of total cases at Adam's College to be Omega Mu variant.
In Washington state, a percent of positive tests are sent to the dept of health for variant sequencing. You can see the published results by week. Delta has outcompeted every other variant for several months. All covid is essentially delta.
I've got a ~10 year old audi with the HDD as well as Dual SD Card Readers. When i first bought it I thought that was absurd, but now that i have it loaded up with multiple 128GB SD cards its actually a pretty good feature.
That’s just how it is now. In a few years, there will be old electric trucks to buy for such purposes. If combined with a phased banning of small ICE devices (such as that proposed by another comment on this story’s thread), the transition won’t be too bad. It’s never going to be perfectly smooth and it has to happen at some point.
Well united airlines employees also once beat a man unconscious and dragged him out of an airplane to make room for more united employees. Maybe they hire a different sort of person there.
How many years, and how many people have to die while going from 99% to 99.9% sure of a vaccine's safety, before you would say it's safe? In your professional opinion as an epidemiologist?
I don't see why an argument needs to be made for it? Being anti-vaccine is anti-public safety and an active attempt to undermine the stability of the country and society. It should be viewed as terroristic.
the "full approval" happened much faster than any other vaccine or medication in recent memory. also the approval was based on the exact same dataset that was used for the EUA, to me that does not inspire confidence
It’s not about inspiring confidence, it’s about measuring uncertainty.
Presently the uncertainty margins are higher for this than other things in the past and other things available. Different standards of uncertainty seem to be used for this, and that’s not necessarily bad considering the scale of the problem being addressed. BUT the uncertainty is not being appropriately represented by the people acting as information authorities.
the CDC recently changed their definition of vaccine from (paraphrasing) "something that provides immunity to disease" to "something that provides protection from a disease"
