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The answer?
Researchers and scientists interviewed by the Miami Herald said the U.K. variant remains poised to spike infections and prolong vaccination efforts, but expressed some optimism that large swaths of Florida protected from natural or vaccine-induced immunity could blunt the impact of the more-contagious strain.
“There is a general sense that Florida is going to be the canary in the coal mine,” said William Lee, vice president of science at Helix, a testing company that has helped state officials track the variant.
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“If it turns out that Florida is fine even with an increase in cases resulting from [the U.K. variant] because of the vaccines and everything else, I think it will be a good sign for the rest of the country,” Lee said.
Especially encouraging is that COVID cases are declining rapidly among senior citizens in Florida — the primary recipients of the state’s vaccine supply.
Jason Salemi, a University of South Florida epidemiologist who tracks COVID data, emphasized earlier this week that cases in the 65-and-older age bracket have gone down 56% in the last four weeks, and have dropped from about 2,500 daily cases to 800 daily cases over the last week — a bigger decrease than seen in other age groups.
UK variant of COVID is overtaking Florida. Can vaccines stymie it or is surge coming?
So basically no. There is no doom and gloom and mass graves pending in the future of Florida and the UK variant seems just to be as the regular Chinese flu. Wait, Aren’t we supposed not to say where the virus comes from? China, bad but UK good?
One the replies for this tweet summarizes it all
You guys really are incredible. Panic porn assholes.
Is it all about the clickbait, trying to generate income? In other nicer times, I would given them the benefit of the doubt, but after all that has happened and the allegiances they insist to be faithful to?
When the news media asks a question in the headline, I have found the best thing to do is answer no and skip the article, because it is all conjecture and idiocy.
The problem is that a LOT of people will take an unanswered question as proof.
Net result is more and more panic.
Unfortunately it’s not just the media doing this. Alleged MDs are doing similar stuff. It may be that they are attention junkies, addicted to the thrill of being on camera. Or it may be that they are power junkies, addicted to the thrill of telling large numbers of people how to live their lives.
In some cases there may be a very faint connection to actual science. For example, it is fair to say that we don’t know all the answers because the subject is new so we don’t have long-range knowledge yet.
But to take that obvious principle and use it as the foundation for a FUD campaign is flat out wrong. For example, I heard last night the statement that recovering from CCP or getting the vaccine might not protect you, not for long. While theoretically true (immunity length and level varies among diseases), the biologically correct answer is that recovering from a disease means you have immunity at that point (that’s how you recover!) and furthermore that recovery in general lasts a substantial amount of time, typically years. So the right answer, in the absence of information to the contrary is “we expect recovery and/or vaccination to protect you for at least a year and possibly quite a lot longer”. If that isn’t the core message, you have to assume that the speaker has an anti-freedom agenda he wants to flog.