While the lack of any big Covid news absent the Administration’s foot shuffling when its mask mandate was shot down, that does not mean Covid should be ignored. Our Covid brain trust and readers have been sending news.
Fresh from IM Doc:
62 patients who are COVID positive – either ill themselves or found during testing or primary contacts. Again, zero unvaccinated. Of the 62 -35 were primary vaccinations, an additional 11 are with one booster – and the other 16 were 2 boostered. I had no partial VAX or J&J this week.
ZERO unvaccinated. That makes 7 weeks of not seeing a single unvaxxed patient. Colleagues all over America are reporting similar issues – usually less than 5% unvaxxed are being reported.
Something is going on. I do not believe for a minute it is because the unvaxxed have decided not to seek care. Nor is it young and healthy excuse – many of the positive vaxxed patients are young and healthy.
I am becoming increasingly concerned that this may go pear-shaped if/when a more noxious variant emerges.
And another alarming issue is rearing its ugly head again. THIS TIME MUCH EARLIER. This did not start last year until the mid to late summer. I have had to admit 3 patients this week – all adults – all 3 with RSV pneumonia. All 3 fully vaxxed and double boosted for COVID. One of these was a little old lady with DM – the other 2 were young men, healthy and robust. All had severe pneumonia. I have never admitted an adult with RSV until the COVID vaccines. Not once in 30 years. Here we go again.
Thankfully, so far, the COVID has been pretty mild. None required admission this week. However, I am certain that at most 5-10 were reported to the health officials. Severe under-reporting is going on. THERE IS A REASON THE CDC and BIDEN PROVIDED AMERICA WITH THE FREE TESTS – AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PATIENT CARE.
Needless to say, it’s not encouraging to see the vaccinated feeling sick enough that they need to see doctors. Regarding the apparent underrepresentation of the unvaccinated, it may be that they are on average more cautious than the vaccinated, who were sold repeatedly on the idea that being vaccinated protected them from getting Covid, or at least from getting all that sick. While the plural of anecdote is not date, the two unvaccinated people I know are insanely careful, hardly seeing anyone and well masked when they do.
Lambert’s Covid data wraps have shown the MA wastewater count rising to a level that was at the high end for all waves before Omicron. It had fallen off this week, but that may be an artifact of Easter/spring vacation holidays.
Additional cheery news:
There is a theoretical risk that serial covid infections could predispose to a future more severe reinfection
It's very simple, no need to go wild
The recent VA paper lends this theory of decompensation credibility
— Anthony J Leonardi, PhD, MS (@fitterhappierAJ) April 18, 2022
It's a complex multivariable system. Let's see if infections progressively get milder. I think not. https://t.co/PnF6hIPtPV
— Anthony J Leonardi, PhD, MS (@fitterhappierAJ) April 18, 2022
Note this hypothesis could also help explain what IM Doc is seeing: individuals who got asymptomatic cases (as in they may not have realized they contracted Covid) before now getting symptomatic ones.
More variants and more waves:
If COVID rising again in Gauteng, South Africa; it’s likely driven in part by emergence of B4, B5 omicron variants
Experimental evidence indicates vaccine induced antibodies don’t neutralize B4, B5 as well as B1, B2 and immunity from prior B1 infection may not be as protective https://t.co/vbDYYSD1Ve
— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 22, 2022
And it’s growing!
R is above 1 in all provinces other than Limpopo. So cases are rising rapidly in most provinces. pic.twitter.com/wA3A0cWZFA
— Louis Rossouw (@lrossouw) April 21, 2022
Scientist GM points out this wave is a month ahead of schedule. He also points out the inconsistency in Gottlieb’s carrying water for the Administration:
In the meantime, in the US, we have some not nice subvariants to watch (hat tip guurst):
Signs of the 6th wave of the #SARSCoV2 pandemic are multiplying.
In the near future, we seem to be saying '#BA2, #BA4, #BA5 waves are now in the US'. https://t.co/YnO0b9kXIs
— Abdulkadir YILMAZ (@a__virologist) April 22, 2022
The #BA2 and BA.2 subvariants rates has increased enough to cause a wave.
In addition, #BA4 cases are seen in some regions.
We know that BA.4 is much more contagious than BA.2. pic.twitter.com/HgELdca8oS
— Abdulkadir YILMAZ (@a__virologist) April 22, 2022
In particular, the #BA2 subvariant BA.2.12.1 needs to be followed carefully.
BA.2.12.1 seems to have a 68% growth advantage over BA.2.https://t.co/KkHfLTrMQ0
— Abdulkadir YILMAZ (@a__virologist) April 22, 2022
So it’s too early to even try to call trajectories, but these emerging variants have the potential to cause yet more trouble, particularly in the US, where we are again throwing caution to the wind.
88 comments
Comments are closed.
The thought occurs that the topics of this post might have some sub-surface interconnections with the topic of the Helmer post.
Is the JRB administration, or a faction within it, hoping to distract the public from the public health crisis?
From my observation point, for the past forty-plus years, *every* faction within *every* administration and *every* congressional opposition party has been hoping to distract the public from the public health crisis, mental and physiological.
If there is any, history will remember the United States as a case study in mass psychopathy.
They just repeat convenient, acceptable & transparent lies to each other; while re-re-reinfecting us, using asymptomatic kids, unmitigated workplace, restaurant/ bars & gatherings to cascade PASC damage? No strike unbroken, protest covered and no contradictory evidence unblocked by complicit media or social networking. A self-perpetuating perfect-storm of hive minded kleptocrats feeding primary voters to 2020’s SuperSpreader Tuesday to kill Medicare For All, as “our, elected” representatives legislate us INTO 1099 gig-serfdom totally devoid of insurance, sick-leave, child-care (while telling everyone to dispense with NPI, then using schools to vector Delta to push monoclonal antibody treatments, then Omicron for subsequent sales of whatever snake-oil they can use to further indenture us PASC precariate into a perpetual race to the bottom? We’re seeing yet more blatant LOTE ratcheting towards authoritarian autocracy, an’at?
I wonder if China is thinking of opening up because of the following: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3175098/coronavirus-hong-kong-government-set-scale-back-flight. So basically foreigners, including tourists(!) will be allowed to fly to Hong Kong starting May 1st. It’s hard to to believe this policy does not have some backing from the Chinese government. If you scroll down on that article, Singapore has also relaxed their restrictions on various activities even more.
HK is pretty much quarantined from Mainland China, so I doubt it has any implications for their policy. While they are going for elimination in Shanghai and Shenzen, they seem content to let it rip in HK.
Hong Kong was Zero Covid too. https://www.ft.com/content/dc5933da-ab55-47f8-bf4a-b1cf6175551d
That’s from last month. So basically within a month, they went from Zero to Let er rip.
Hong Kong is doing some weirdo version of limited covid zero. So, we opened schools and other stuff, but there is still the 7 day quarantine for all international travelers and aggressive contact tracing. We also still do the building lockdown testing and isolation. So, the plan (uncertain if it will actually work) is to track down any omicron cases so that it won’t blow up. Given that half the island did manage contract it (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3169739/hong-kong-university-data-model-predicts-peak), then as long as HK doesn’t manage to have BA4 or BA5 or whatever newfangled variant of the hour in via quarantine, the hope (possibly wishful thinking) is to go back to covid zero.
Could we get a study of why some of us unvaxxed (negative antibodies) surrounded by COVID still don’t get it?
Mother killed off, fully vaxxed spouse and kid #2 got it (spouse now on beta-blockers since pfizer vax 2). Even with COVID in the home, kid #1 and I (over 50) did not get it.
I guess we’re going to have to wait years for this entire episode to play out, but seeing what spouse is going through, I’m glad I declined vax. Hopefully kid #2 doesn’t suffer long-term impact (got vax for overseas travel).
It’s still understudied but blood type might be a predictor for severity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286549/
Assuming no asymptomatic infections…here a few academicians’ theories are cited in this article. Basically they suspect either cross immunity with cold viruses, mucosal immunity, genetics or environmental factors. Condolences for your loss.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2022/02/14/never-covid
Seems to me that IMDoc is hinting around that the vax itself may have something to do with the unusual trend. As to
my own view has always been that we vax skeptics are obligated to take our own precautions and I still wear a mask in stores where maybe two or three customers are wearing and no staff. But I also think that forcing everyone including young people to wear them when the disease is in (perhaps temporary) decline will only provoke defiance and be counterproductive. Here’s suggesting that the real beginning of Biden’s approval rating crash was the vaccine mandate and rightly so. The punditocracy prefer to believe it was because he was “weak” on Afghanistan but Americans don’t care that much about foreign policy. Freedom they care about.
It’s a source of constant bewilderment that the reality of Living With Covid hasn’t sunk it for the Youngs (among whom I count myself) yet. It really couldn’t be simpler. The current plan is for everyone to be infected with SARS2 1-4 times a year. This will probably be the plan for about another two years until the penny drops that this is a spectacularly braindead idea. The fact is: if you’re infected with SARS2 1-4 times a year, the probability of Extremely Bad Shit Happening will approach 1 – and I suspect no amount of Vitamin D, Zinc, Vaccine or Ivermectin is going to be able to stave that off. Doubt this all you want, say “well we just don’t know what’s going to happen!!”, etc. we know enough, and there’s every reason to believe some of the more realistically reasoned dire predictions as opposed to, say, whatever drivel the degenerate GBD/Brookstone scumbags are serving up this week.
Respirators (masks) absolutely suck, and I hate that they are now a necessary mainstay in my life. Yet they remain among the easiest and most effective ways to avoid infection in any given situation, and therefore of preventing Extremely Bad Shit from happening. It’s truly staggering to try and get one’s head around the degree of suffering that awaits us, all unnecessary, all avoidable, yet now inevitable thanks to a Goebbelsian propaganda campaign of astonishing efficacy. So, yes, the youngs are no longer being forced to wear masks, but anyone who actually recognises what is at stake recognises that, whether by force of law or not, they will remain mandatory for years to come unless you want to maximise your risk of a life curtailed and with an abundance of pointless suffering in the meantime.
While waves will have peaks and troughs, the virus will never be “in decline” in any meaningful sense of the word while R0 is allowed (encouraged!) to stay above 1. The threat is omnipresent. The virus is relentless.
But there’s really nothing to be done at this point. It’s a truly hopeless situation. All remaining Covid protections (‘restrictions’) are being undone (incidentally: people complain about an endless treadmill of vaccinations and boosters but this concern is one that is utterly divorced from reality; vaccine research and development has fallen off a cliff. The current vaccines will be literally completely worthless in a matter of months and there are no updates in sight). Everywhere except China it’s now every man for himself. The situation will be irreversible until social leaders (business, media, political) decide that the problem is worth actually solving. By then the pathogen will have done enormous damage – to health, the economy and ~freedom~, like the state is the only thing capable of cruelly and capriciously sabotaging the latter. Again, it’s why I struggle to get my head around the more florid vaccine conspiracists; the reality of what is actually being done to us is many times more astonishing. But if people understood that, I guess we’d probably have more than inane trucker protests to worry about.
To this I should of course have added “and to keep you from infecting others”. It will surely not come as a surprise to many here that when the rubber hit the road in the form of a genuine, universal moral crisis, that the Black Lives Matterists and bourgeois feminists etc. have, for the most part, been found desperately wanting. Those brunches won’t eat themselves!!
In my little Twitterverse there is a very loud “masks don’t work” chorus out there. As with much of the SC2 discussion there is no nuance and blunt generalisations are treated like gospel. My understanding is that poorly fitted face cloths aren’t much help but well fitting 95’s can make a difference. Sadly the benefit of appropriate masks worn correctly seems to have been lost in the noise. I also think the ‘it’s only mild’ crowd aren’t helping. Symptoms this time around might be mild but what is happening beneath the surface, and what happens after infection/vaccination (spike exposure) number 4, 5, 6, 7 etc? Could we be boiling frogs?
The scene was set with the Mission Accomplished ritual mask burning ckock-up last year. Absent an enormous PR campaign you can’t unring that bell. But of course, there’s no real interest in unringing it or rectifying that mistake. Or even just admitting that mistake.
Count me as one who is very happy to have avoided the vaccine-booster-booster-booster-infinity treadmill. I know several people who experienced severe side effects and I would venture to guess that one would qualify as vaccine injured.
Me? I’m going to keep working on my health.
The first thing to point out in your case is, no offense intended, you have no clue whether or not you’ve had it! Lack of antibodies is not conclusive evidence you’ve never been infected. It’s not even in the ballpark. This is in fact why, if our government had any interest in actually coping with this crisis, people like you, who’ve been asymptomatic and haven’t seroconverted despite presumptive exposure, should have been sought out for detailed immunological and genetic investigation. People who show no evidence of infection, and people who appear to have fought off the virus without discernable negative consequences would constitute groups of interest, to be considered separately, but if they’re lumped in with run-of-the-mill asymptomatic infections with evidence of unnoticed deleterious effects the picture is hopelessly muddied. Of course the process of doing this would necessarily involve putting a hard number on the frequency of those deleterious effects, and that ain’t gonna happen is it?
In my opinion the most egregious failure of US media, and not just the mainstream media either, has been the promotion of various flavors of woo-woo in preference to an honest accounting of how much hard study is needed to begin to understand this subject. From very early on there were a number of hypotheses concerning susceptibility to, and severity of, Covid. It was striking to me at the time that the more genuine expertise a hypothesis had behind it, the more grave its probable consequences appeared to be. Anthony Leonardi’s conjectures on the role of T-cells are exemplars of this.
But what the press have given us is pronouncements by whatever the guru du jour of their preference is, be it some establishment type or someone edgier like Malone, invariably giving some single-factor explanation, which one can safely assume will prove to be wrong in multiple important ways.
well stated
I also wonder if some of the reports of not being infected despite apparent exposure – besides the more obvious explanation of being infected but not knowing it – might also be a case of being Fooled By Randomness, but maybe that’s overly simplistic on my part? It also seems unlikely when known exposures and durations of exposure are frequent and long.
Likely there are going to turn out to be a lot of reasons why people don’t catch covid when exposed, including luck.
This is an interesting article on some of the possible reasons why people don’t get infected:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/scientists-seek-to-solve-mystery-of-why-some-people-do-not-catch-covid
There is a girl in that article who succeeded in not catching covid in the challenge trials! But later…
Hanover is currently the covid capital of NH. As of yesterday, the College’s case count was again nearing 600 (580), but no measures will be put back into place. It’s tearing through here again, but the plan is to just ignore it. I continue to mask and take precautions. I have been wondering how many of the college kids have had it, how many have had it more than once due to the let ‘er rip policy of the administration, and when the long term effects will begin to manifest and what they will be. The local public transportation system has also removed the mask policy, though they are recommended. Mask use in the local grocery store is dropping quickly.
Interesting, thanks for reporting. Tufts in metro-Boston has reinstated indoor masking due to a surge of student cases.
April 23…. Schooool zout for sum mer! Soon- very soon.
Make sure you take this home for your parents to see….
June 7th is the last day of Spring term finals. Then Summer term for ugrads starts June 23rd, and alums come in from all over the country for reunions mid-June through July.
The second tranche of pfizer docs have been released. The Rising’s Kim Iverson runs through some interesting finds in the released data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eJ5TIT6zvk
There’s a big blue box beneath it saying “COVID-19 vaccine-Get the latest information from the CDC. Learn More. See more resources on Google”. There’s no way to get rid of it.
Nothing like a little irony on a lovely Tucson morning.
In yesterday’s Water Cooler Lambert labeled a flattened biobot.io/data curve as “Good”, but it looks to me like it could have been just a midwest missing data glitch.
Meanwhile, here on the outskirts of the swamp, I’ve been watching Arlington and Alexandria’s biobot wastewater counts spike. Last week Loudon County joined the spike fest. One in ten are masking, only one in ten of those are sporting N-95s.
In Arlington and Alexandria the recent spike is now a few weeks old. I wish I had good hospitalization data from these counties.
> In yesterday’s Water Cooler Lambert labeled a flattened biobot.io/data curve as “Good”
What was good was that the Northeast flattened, consistent with MWRA data (however temporary) and consistent with case data.
Good, of course, by comparison to a curve that doubles every couple of days or so, like a jet screaming into the air (as we have seen in the past).
If you would send me a link to your biobot data that would be great. I don’t trust the CDC wastewater page and in any case the interface is horrid. Thank you!
The biobot.io data is right there at https://biobot.io/data : scroll down and there’s an input box that lets you select a state and view the participating communities in the selected state.
There aren’t a lot of participating communities in any state that I’ve checked :-(, but in my case, I can watch the sh!t flow out of DC toward me …
I am not seeing mask any where. Grocery store even very elderly frail looking people are not masked. Bank likewise. Lots of cars in parking lots of restaurants and bars. I do not go any where. I keep n95 on at all times. No one allowed come to my house. I live in Kentucky. This week beginning of Kentucky derby super spreader events. Fireworks show tonight will be packed with at least 500,000. All in close quarters. Bars will be full etc. not to mention people flying in from all over the country.
We did a UWS Trader Joe’s yesterday, ~30% understaffed, packed with SUPER Immune yuppies, all trying to bash through a couple, blocking the vestibule, Instagramming their mindfulness coaches as mouthbreathers all lectured each-other LOUDLY, directly into each other’s maskless faces? This was the COVID ravaged store, where an associate was fired for leaking the tragic truth, online.
Yesterday, Lowe’s was elbow-to-elbow packed. I was the only person wearing a mask. Shopping mostly in the outdoor Garden center.
I read these rather worrisome reports and wonder if it makes sense to get a booster shot. Already got the two Pfizer shots. My partner, too. No problems. Maybe we got lucky, or perhaps it worked, putting social life on complete hold for the past 18 months. Next up would be Moderna. I feel like I’m not the only one having these doubts.
fwiw I got a Moderna booster 4 weeks ago. This was after double AZ (which for some reason it’s way less controversial to declare a pretty crappy vaccine at this stage), so I was pretty committed to getting a booster. No adverse effects whatsoever except for a bit of pain at injection site (compared to the AZ shots where I was pretty severely under the weather for 1-2 days after each).
I don’t know that I’ll bother with a 4th booster when the time comes, and will wait for a strain-matched intramuscular vaccine (lol) or an intranasal one (double lol) instead. Could be a long wait!
I guess much as well depends on whether you think you can avoid the virus based on your living/working circumstances. I’m lucky enough to be able to avoid it a lot more easily than most but wanted that last line of defence (the booster) there anyway.
Last night at 11.59pm in Melbourne where I live, what remained of the mask mandate was removed – it applied to hospitality workers only, I think, who for the most part were using chin diaper surgical masks anyway. Vaccine entry requirements were removed too, though vaccination rates in Victoria and indeed all of Australia are very high. Not because we’re compliant softies; because we’re generally pretty willing to do what we think is the right thing to help address the problem, hence our pre-vaccine success. Unfortunately the penny hasn’t dropped yet that everyone has been lied to about what the vaccines were going to be able to do for us; thus, Australia is now in the throes of one of its most serious mass death crises in its history – and will surely become the greatest in a matter of months. This unpleasant factoid has, of course, been completely ignored by just about everyone. In lifting remaining Covid protections last night, the Vic government said that (because we’re vaccinated) we’ll be able to move “safely” in to winter. For some definition of ‘safely’, to borrow the phraseology of our hosts here.
At a music festival last weekend an infectious diseases doctor saw my N95 mask and we chatted as it became apparent that he’s a fellow Covid truther, lol. He asked “do you ever find yourself in a room and think you’re the only one who isn’t completely crazy?” or words to that effect. It’s become an all-too-common recurring thought in the past 9 or so months since we decided to Let Er Rip
The media really have been pushing this freedom idea. One clip I saw a coupla times showed three workers in a cafe pull down their masks and then go for a group hug. And ocean cruisers are back and now we can all go to Bali or wherever. There is going to be hell to pay and the mounting death toll is being ignored. I think that people would be surprised to know what it is at the moment. And Long Covid? What’s that?
Dr Noor Bari on the twitter summarised it tersely a few months ago: given the choice between making international travel difficult, or making everything difficult, we chose to make everything difficult.
And a GREAT synopsis, it is, too! Whatever’s declared BAD for any specific corporate donor; inconvenient for entitled, speciously brainwashed PMC churls, OR keeps rich, white folks from monitizing liquidation of essentials’ apartments, equity & labor (by way of indenturing re-re-infected PASC victims) must be eradicated; ANY action by government must be limited to hiding our corpses, by scams that’d make Boss Hogg blush. Government’s job, is misclassification of former employees, into gypsies, tramps, theives and cascading, eventually lethal PASC becomes: psychosomatic, malingering? Just LIVE with death, peons!
Thats a great line, I intend stealing that one.
Dr Geert VB has been warning about this from the beginning that introducing mass vaccination of non-sterilizing vaccines in the middle of a pandemic would cause endless mutations that would escape the vaccine “protection”. Here is a recent update that speaks directly to what we are seeing now. I hope he is wrong.
https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/videos-and-interviews/international-vaccine-expert-geert-vanden-bossche-speaks-up-again
Nonsense.
Our entire situation is novel – new rapidly spreading pathogen. All other pathogens we’ve been concerned with in modern history have been slow to spread (HIV) or existed for millennia and so are well adapted already.
To say we know this pathogen will adapt differently to “natural” immunity than induced? Given weird variants seem to have popped up in the immunocompromised, where they can’t quite get rid of the infection, I don’t think we can confidently say the immune system is doing a great job here.
Plus, you know, the vaccine is for a virus functionally extinct for 2 years. We shouldn’t be expecting much effectiveness at this point.
My take on what I’ve read by Dr. van den Bosche, is that he seems to be operating on the basis of a theory of viral infection which is axiomatic in character, though I’ve not seen any axioms explicated. I suspect that were we to examine those axioms we’d find that our current situation violates one or more of them.
His critique of mass vaccination while permitting ongoing mass transmission was clearly valid (I’d note that even a ‘sterilizing’ vaccine might not be up to the job in the real world.) but I don’t regard his predictions for how things will play out in the longer term as sufficiently well-evidenced.
Friday I went to the local Kroger grocery store here in lower Middle Tennessee. Up to now I’d say about one third of customers and staff were masked. Yesterday only one employee and I were masked. And the store was full of people of all ages.
Twin Cities wastewater current rise
https://metrotransitmn.shinyapps.io/metc-wastewater-covid-monitor/
I’m not sure I’d read too much into the VHA study. The 3 infection population is 189 people. That’s much too small to be drawing any sweeping conclusions–but its certainly cautionary at this point
Also worth noting that people who are being infected a third time are being infected by a variant which the vaccines were not designed for unlike a high proportion of those infected the first time
https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9000/Severe_Hepatitis_in_Pediatric_COVID_19.95438.aspx
I recall reading in the NC comments that once approved the vaccines should come with a standard disclosure form (notably side effects). There was some discussion that vaccines were being administered without said form. Instead, at the time procedures continued like they were under the EUA. Was there ever any update on this? Perhaps I just missed it. This just seems a good place to ask.
“standard disclosure form”
**********
That should also include the fact that Pfizer, AZ, JJ are all convicted criminal organizations, certainly a very germane piece of information. I have seen so-called Informed Consent forms which do not disclose these facts.
TWiV 892: COVID-19 clinical update #111 with Dr. Daniel Griffin, April 23, 2022 (54 minutes)
Various topics discussed including Long Covid toward the end. Cites paper Global Prevalence of Post COVID-19 Condition or Long COVID: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review. Authors estimate that 200 million people worldwide are suffering from Long Covid.
That was an interesting episode. I thought the discussion at the beginning was good, but grim. Dr. Griffin opined that one of the reasons that we’re not currently seeing hospitalization increases despite the increases in cases is because we’ve already killed off the most vulnerable. We’ve already isolated or removed the weak and susceptible. Using the wildfire analogy we seem to have constructed a fire break for ourselves out of dead bodies :/
I thought the discussion they had about zero COVID policies in China was interesting too. That they did the zero COVID but didn’t follow up with anything so now they’re facing a situation where Omicron is ripping through their population with an almost 4% mortality rate!
I couldn’t find the referenced source to their COVID breathalyzer report but I hope we can see that adopted en mass soon! They said the test was really good at detecting whether someone was really negative and that the test results were available in 3 minutes. That’s almost good enough to be used in basic queues to airports and concerts and such. And it’s way better than the rapid tests we have now. I hope the reports were accurate and we see that device in use soon.
Here in midcounty Montgomery County MD – outside the beltway – I went to Costco and the library yesterday.
Costco: 9 AM early opening hours for seniors, etc. has been dropped. Something like 1 out of 4 customers were masked – mainly older ones, like myself.
Library: Also mostly unmasked. There’s a security guard who sits near the entrance – twentysomething, bored looking, unmasked – but why is he here? Pre-pandemic we had no such quasi-police presence. When masks were required I assumed he was there to remind people who came in unmasked to mask up – and he sits next to the table where free masks and rapid covid tests are still being distributed. But if he can’t do that, why is he still here? Maybe just inertia, maybe the administration thinks required masking might come back. I haven’t asked anyone.
Yesterday was about 70 degrees where I live. I went to a local restaurant that used to have igloos outside for year-round outdoor seating. Patio was closed until later in the season. Inside was packed. Not a single open bar seat and an hour wait for a table.
…I went to 2 other places that also used to have year round outdoor. Same story. The entire outdoor setup they’ve had for the last 2 years was taken down and patio was closed until Memorial Day. Inside was jammed.
Not a single mask at the grocery store or CVS. People no longer give space in social interactions. And going out with a “cold” seems to be socially acceptable again. Coughs and sniffles were everywhere.
I feel like I was airdropped into 2019. And now I basically have to decide if I want to participate in society or worry about covid – there is no in-between anymore.
>> And now I basically have to decide if I want to participate in society or worry about covid – there is no in-between anymore.
In many places, this situation of fake normalcy won’t last long, since cases will rise so much that once again it becomes impossible to ignore. In particular, air travel and healthcare will be impacted. Then add that to supply disruptions globally…
However, I wonder about up here in the northeastern US where I am. Cases peaked early and the good weather should be a headwind against rising cases so we may get stuck in this middle area where things can still function amid disease and death.
I wonder how much warm weather will be a buffer if we’re acting “normal”. In 2020 and 2021 warm weather was a buffer because people hung out outside rather then inside. SInce inside is now deamed safe–more people are hanging out in enclosed spaces again
Are there any “intentional community”-style community living experiments where the residents do all the sane mitigations (Corsi boxes, outdoor socialization, daily pooled testing, and maintaining good health in the first place)? Like some kind of hippy commune instead of healing crystals it’s actual science?
Hi Joe, yes, Yaneer Bar-Yam’s group had a session on something like that at a conference. The one I watched had a flavor of being like, we’re some German ravers who are getting restless about the lack of in-person dancing and want to carefully design something where everybody tests at the door and is only let through the airlock once their negatives come back.
I haven’t dug it up for you all the way but here’s the link to the summit, or one of them.
https://www.worldhealthnetwork.global/summit-sessions/
It seems to me that the least alarming explanation for IM Doc’s observation is that the mRNA vaccines were very narrowly targeted, so people who got those vaccines will eventually meet up with a variant for which the vaccine-generated immunity offers little or no protection. Unvaccinated people who got Omicron a few months ago might currently have a broader spectrum immunity that is more robust against whatever is currently circulating.
There are lots of more alarming possibilities involving original antigenic sin, exhausted T-cells, etc. Those are all way above my pay grade, but I can see no reason why we might not have different vulnerability profiles between vaccinated and unvaccinated with each different variant.
Unless IM Doc’s 62-0 pattern holds up long-term, it may be very difficult to sort out whether vaccinated or unvaccinated people are worse off as more and more people die and are disabled by successive waves. And of course no adequate studies will ever be done to provide answers, at least in this country.
Anecdote: Union TV/film crew reg’s still call for intensive testing and mandatory masking on set, with increasingly restrictive zones up to adjacent to talent, who must work unmasked.
So, going in for a twice weekly test swab, the swab collector’s story is that she had been a lifelong emergency room nurse who finally contracted Covid last year, then got it again. She can no longer perform her duties, so has found work at a much lower level.
The nurse was melancholy and morose about losing her career. The haunting possibility of widespread disability among workers may be here.
Thanks for this anecdote. Incidentally I also gather that air cleaning on film sets/location is a lot more serious than many other workplaces (although I guess HEPA etc can’t run while actually shooting because of the noise). Such workplaces have issues with insuring actors of course (and pretty strong unionisation for crew too if I understand it correctly. maybe that makes a difference)
Sorry to hear about the nurse :(
I have a relative in MI who is in her 50s. Her mom had to take heavy duty meds when she was pregnant with her, and as a consequence she is mentally different. I’m not trying to sugar coat this; she is different. She is good at surprising things, and terrible at surprising things. She appears to be mentally retarded, but actually she isn’t, but she does have challenges. It has always been hard for her to find tolerable jobs. Her last job was as a home health aide, but that was starting to wear her out and she wanted to do something different.
Now she is sought after. She failed at several hospital jobs she tried out for, but then HR determined that she is just right for signing people in for MRIs; she is very good at going over the checklist. In the past they would never have given her a chance.
I guess this means that someday I’ll be employable if I stay well, but that will take longer.
Sorry to hear that. I relate to it. I was on a zero hours contract in admin in oncology in (ironically) a UK NHS hospital until 3-4 weeks ago. I contracted COVID (LFT then PCR confirmed but I recognised symptoms from my almost-certainly-first infection Feb 2020 when selling PPE to the public after family business retooled). Day after I sent in PCR result I was told my services were no longer required and I’d get no more shifts.
I know my productivity was really good – two oncology consultants wanted it noted in my HR record. However other things are in play. I know of multiple colleagues who’d had it just before me. But they were “important”. In any case I’ve being testing whether I can walk 300-400 metres easily (distance from bus stop to another hospital dept who’d take me in a heart beat to do more zero hours stuff to catch up on continuing backlog). Answer? No. I’m like a wheezing old man with severe COPD. I’m way worse than after first infection. (This is my first clinically confirmed infection but I’m 99% sure my 3rd overall since Jan 2020).
At moment dermatologist refuses to utter the words “long covid” but last time I saw her Registrar who hadn’t been copied in on the memo. Revealed that practically all their patients were like me – auto-immune conditions (and not just skin ones) dating to early 2020….and it is rapidly getting worse. Needless to say I’m vaccinated (2x AZ + Pfizer booster). Mother (who I am primary carer for) just been invited for another Pfizer booster. She’s refusing. Our suspected 2nd infection happened just after the Pfizer booster. I’m keeping open mind about it – the timing could equally be just be bad luck since delta was rampant. But at the movement let’s just say I’m not keen to go within 100m of any clinician for any reason.
PS mask usage plummeted in shops but is going back up again on local buses (without rules/prompting). Oh and using your mask as a chin diaper is apparently ok in oncology in my local hospital. *Rolls eyes*
“And of course no adequate studies will ever be done to provide answers, at least in this country.”
I am also in two minds as to if or when there will ever be clear answers.
Martin Kulldorff (epidemiologist and biostatician, formerly at Harvard, and co-author of Barrington Declaration) writes about a new (preprint) paper:
https://brownstone.org/articles/have-people-been-given-the-wrong-vaccine/
Ugh, Brownstone is next door to the Great Barrington Declaration democidists. Please, no.
Ouch!
Democidists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
You are accusing the GBD signees of “the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command”??
Note, there’s nothing “nextdoor” about my link, the article is written by a co-author of the GBD (as I clearly indicated). I thought some here might find the paper and Martin Kulldorff’s commentary interesting. My apologies if links from Brownstone are verboten at NC.
He comments on a Danish study presented in a Lancet preprint paper assessing the Random Controlled Trials of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines reporting overall mortality, including COVID-19 deaths, accident deaths, cardiovascular deaths and other non-COVID-19 deaths.
Danish study:
Randomised Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines: Do Adenovirus-Vector Vaccines Have Beneficial Non-Specific Effects?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489
The “Lancet” label is utterly misleading, which makes be doubt the bona fides of that paper. SSRN says the paper has absolutely nothing to do with The Lancet.
I’ve been wondering about Canada, which is not that far away. Apparently they think they are in their sixth Covid wave now. And that 90% of their population have been vaccinated or had Covid or both.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/omicron-immunity-canada-covd19-vaccines-1.6428536
This is dismaying. Early on in the Delta wave there were some signs that here in California we were seeing what could almost be described as an epidemic of the vaccinated, but it became clear that during those early days at least, mask-off foolishness among the vaccinated, especially the well-to-do vaccinated could account for it.
What you’re describing now doesn’t sound terribly susceptible to that kind of explanation – but I can think of a couple related possibilities: If vaccinated people in your area were much more likely to contract BA.1 early on, then negative consequences* of reinfection with BA.2 could be strongly skewed right now. Likewise if vaccinated people are much more likely to have wittingly or unwittingly experienced multiple infections already the effects of compounded damage could skew heavily to the vaccinated.
If the numbers of behavioral victims of CDC happy-talk weren’t so mind-boggling I’d be thinking “S***t it’s the vaccine!”But there is a huge amount of induced stupidity out there, and it does correlate strongly with vaccination.
Before anyone accuses me of vaccine apologetics, please note that if what IM Doc is observing is indeed a consequence of vaccination that’s probably a less dire scenario overall, and might actually represent a less grieveous failure of the vaccines than the posiblilities I’m suggesting, even if it might be bad news for me personally.
*I’m thinking specifically of priming of immune response to, I believe it’s N-protein components? I can’t find my source, but I recall reading that BA.1 displayed these on uninfected cells as decoys/inflammation promoters. It lodged in my memory, as similarities with BA.2 seemed to make subsequent infection with BA.2 look more threatening.
The day before yesterday my 79 y.o. mom went to the emergency room. She wasn’t in dire straits at all but she had had diarrhea for three days (she ordinarily has a cast iron stomach) and a headache (she never gets headaches) and she was feeling a little dizzy and had a weird itchy area, so it seemed prudent. She is double vaccinated and has had one booster and lives in eastern CT, where covid cases have been rising like crazy. They ran bloodwork (which was fine), scanned her and found nothing, and surmised that she was reacting to a new medication and sent her home; she was very well satisfied.
Here’s the thing: they did draw blood, but her nose was never swabbed at all. Do they test for covid in some alternative way in hospitals? I see online that “Blood samples are only used to test for antibodies and not to diagnose COVID-19.” (https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/covid-19-test-basics#:~:text=Blood%20samples%20are%20only%20used,from%20a%20finger%20stick.) I also see that “It can take days to weeks after an infection for your body to make antibodies.” (same source)
Covid never came up, and she never asked. But I thought that upset stomach and headache were very common symptoms of omicron.
So yesterday she returned to her usual socializing; breakfast with friends and the like. Still symptomatic, but they were told and didn’t care. She has some home covid tests but hasn’t used one since no medical person suggested that she should; they are still sitting in their little boxes.
Good thoughts to you and your mom karen.
This is really really poor and a testament to how bad medical care is in the US.
And it is a very comfortably off area with a lot of rich New Yorkers, and the doctors and medical care are considered to be excellent there, and in general I think that is true. I think that covid has just now become an official blind spot; their patients don’t want to think about it and they don’t want to think about it since why make a fuss, perhaps. For the first two days of symptoms she took the unmentionable prophylactics that I take, at my suggestion, but they didn’t seem to do anything; I suppose they could have kept things from getting worse but that is total speculation.
She’s stopped taking the supposedly offending new medication, but her symptoms have not gone away. Now that she’s been proclaimed “well enough,” she has lost interest in the topic. She doesn’t really care if diarrhea and a mild headache are the new normal as long as they don’t make her miserable. Her staggeringly sociable boyfriend, who goes out to breakfast or lunch with friends nearly daily, is thrilled to have her back; I guess he can be the main vector for whatever my mom is brewing up.
I’m sad to say the UK NHS has fallen victim to this too. They only got around to adding the 9 “new” (omicron related) symptoms to the list of warning signs a few weeks ago (I believe NC reported this – I certainly saw the IT popup on my work pc only shortly before I left).
We were told the hospital had no LFT/PCR tests left for staff – we were basically told to use the UK govt portal and use the “health care worker” cheat to get a test kit sent first class post.
They’ve given up.
Useful article: Why we can’t ‘boost’ our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic for the long term
https://theconversation.com/why-we-cant-boost-our-way-out-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-for-the-long-term-181027
For myself, age 62, fairly healthy, triple Pfizer vaxed, taking a fourth vax seems a bit iffy, based on the stuff I read (from Israel?), you get maybe a month of antibody boost…..and that’s it. Since I stay pretty isolated, mask well and minimize human contact (“don’t share air”!), I’ll probably just wait until fall and hope there is a broad(er) spectrum vaccine or a nasal (sterilizing?? It’s our only hope, really) vaccine.
Re: IM Doc’s observations, I’m going to guess the anti-vaxed portion of the un-vaxed population may delay/deny being sick until they either recover or need to go straight to the ER? What are the hospital numbers in his area looking like, vaxed versus un-vaxed?
Also perhaps, per the Canadian article I posted earlier, perhaps the vaccines (which target strains that hardly circulate anymore) are less effective at preventing infection from new variants, and/or the unvaxed already had Omicron and are now better protected for the newer variants?
So many mysteries…..so few detectives!!
“Re: IM Doc’s observations, I’m going to guess the anti-vaxed portion of the un-vaxed population may delay/deny being sick until they either recover or need to go straight to the ER?”
There may be some of that. But a lot of unvaxxed people are still being required to test regularly due to their unvaxxed status. I’m not vaxxed so I am required to test weekly for my volunteer position, and have done so since Jan. 1st. So far I have not tested positive.
Sitrep from rural Newfoundland, Canada. Due to closed borders and forced quarantines on arrivals, we had almost no covid in 2020 and well into 2021. No masking, limited social distancing, only impact was people arriving had to quarantine for two weeks (which was hard on out-of-province workers). Effectively, we had Zero Covid for most of that time.
Borders were opened to the fully-vaccinated (no more quarantines) in summer 2021. We started getting isolated outbreaks of Delta in autumn 2021, but they were quickly contained.
Newfoundland is large in area, but small in population, mostly rural with a lot of wilderness. Generally an older population with a lot of retired people, many overweight and obese.
92% vaccinated.
Now, there is a lot of covid. Almost no immunity from previous infections, since there was so little covid here before Omicron.
30% of all deaths in the pandemic happened in the last 22 days! Since they no longer report vaccination status of deaths, I presume all these deaths were in the vaccinated.
Covid is being dealt with here by:
* having a compliant media, mostly owned or subsidized by the state
* restricting PCR testing (rapid tests can be bought in stores, and are also distributed to schools and care homes)
* not allowing Ivermectin or HCQ to treat or prevent covid
* Paxlovid is available in certain cases (I’m not sure of the details)
* recommending the last 8% get vaccinated and others get boosted
* mandatory vaccination for most workers
* prohibiting unvaccinated from flying or taking ferries
* recommending masks (no mention of respirators) to “reduce the spread of droplets”
Masking in grocery stores seems up to 90% now. It’s all cloth masks and surgical masks–so reducing the droplets and letting the aerosols through.
I’ve never seen anyone wear a P-100 respirator, and they would not be recommended by the health department because they have an exhaust valve. I’ve only seen one other person wear an N95 respirator (my dentist, and the rest of his office wore surgical masks).
I used to wear an N95. When mask mandates ended last month, I decided to instead trust in cross-reactive immunity, good health, fresh air, exercise and supplements (C,D,K,zinc,copper,magnesium,quercetin,nac,nigella sativa). Also because of something Geert Vanden Bossche said about limited exposure being good to develop innate immunity.
I’ve not seen a Corsi box anywhere, or heard anyone mention them, though I noticed my dentist (who wore the N95) had some standalone air cleaners.
Anecdotally, since Omicron took over, I only know one unvaccinated person that got covid, and she had a cocaine problem, so other health issues. I know quite a few vaccinated people that got covid (none got seriously ill). I am not vaccinated and have not had covid as far as I know (never tested).
The South Africa situation is quite worrying.
Let’s revisit the history there:
1. Virus reaches them somewhat late, they also lock down early, they only get a major wave in late May and June 2020. It infects a lot of people — seropositivity was 30-50% in some of the locations that were studied later. Then the wave subsides.
2. Late November/December 2020, i.e. exactly 6 months later the next wave comes. Driven by B.1.351/Beta, with three RBD mutations relative to the WT. That was the deadliest wave at its peak (Beta was a really nasty variant), and they were already seeing a lot of reinfections at the time although most infections were still primary.
3. This one started more slowly, and it’s hard to pinpoint when it exactly it became a “wave”, but roughly another 6 months later — May 2021 — Delta caused the third wave. It dragged much longer than previous waves and only fully subsided in September 2021. It killed the most people in total because of the long duration. Delta had two RBD mutations relative to WT and 5 RBD mutations relative to Beta. A lot of reinfections in that wave too, but still, the majority was presumably still primary infections. The fact that it hit the hardest Gauteng, the province that had been least impacted up to that point, while impacting the least Eastern Cape, the province most devastated by Beta, does support that idea.
4. Another exactly 6 months later — November 2021 — Omicron BA.1 appears. At this point there is barely anyone who has not had it already, probably a quarter of the population had been reinfected too. Mildest wave so far because of certain weird epistatic effects suppressing S1/S2 cleavage and shifting the tissue tropism.
Then there is an attempt at a quick wave with BA.2 (which, again, is more different from BA.1 than even Beta was from Delta) in February 2021, but it fizzles out.
Many people interpret this as triumph of herd immunity — the BA.1 wave had the lowest mortality so far, BA.2 did not take off.
Meanwhile in the UK where they are all triple vaxxed and infected at least once, which should be as good as or better than twice infected (the situation in South Africa), there is a nasty BA.2 wave, but who pays attention to such wrinkles in the story…
5. Not in May/June 2022 as expected on the 6-month schedule, but a month earlier, in April 2022, BA.4 and BA.5 start going up in KZN and Gauteng. With three RBD changes relative to BA.2, meaning 8-9 changes compared to BA.1. And the curve is going up more sharply than any other wave except the original BA.1 one.
Now what the hell is happening here? After multiple rounds of infection, and with several quite different variants too, one would think that at least case growth would be more blunted, as at this point there are so many people with very complex exposure histories that this kind of synchronous massive wave should not be happening — nobody is naive anymore, and most people have seen vaccines, WT, Beta, Delta, Omicron viruses, i.e. there should be a lot of antibody breadth. Even if they are waning, but given how much exposure there has been, you would think that it would take a year at least before waning can allow for a massive new wave. Instead we get the next wave mere 4-5 months after the previous one.
Of course it remains to be seen how bad it will be in terms of severe outcomes, but even if it as again on the level of BA.1, the R_0 has no business being this high in this context. And I actually doubt it will be as “mild” as the BA.1 wave — BA.2 is intrinsically more severe, and in vitro studies have suggested (this before BA.4/BA.5 appeared) that putting L452R on top of Omicron leads to more severe phenotypes too, so it should compound, and also combine with strong further immune escape due to F486V.
So COVID endemicity is actually so far going much worse than expected even by the pessimists (I have always been a notable one). Common cold coronaviruses show a two-year periodicity, and while lots of people do get reinfected on shorter intervals, the overall epidemic curves show big peaks that are two years apart, and on average for the individual reinfection indeed happens once every two years. With SARS-CoV-2 we are only now reaching the two-year point, and much of the world isn’t even there yet as it skipped the early 2020 first wave due to locking down on time. Yet the hardest hit regions are now starting on mass reinfection round #3, with the interval between reinfections shortening to months, not years….
This is alarming. I wonder about comparable situations elsewhere.
A curious aspect about the “return to normality” is that the MSM seem to have completely ceased reporting on the emergence of COVID-19 variants and the progression of the pandemic in other countries.
For instance, Brazil and Peru were much discussed earlier because of the deadly impact of the pandemic in those countries, the massive reinfection rates in Brazil in the first 12-18 months in the pandemic (quite a bad outlook regarding acquired/herd immunity through infection), and because variants (P1, lambda) originated there that had the potential to become dominant strains causing new dangerous waves of contamination. Since autumn 2021, information has dried up, I have no idea what is happening in South America. Are we flying blind?
Your conclusions in the last paragraph are quite worrisome. A real change of direction in public health policy is in order, but the last two years suggest it won’t be forthcoming.
I keep wondering if the boosters are really worth the risks now (e.g., myocarditis), as we are dealing with a variety of new variants and it rather seems the current crop of vaccines were designed before they appeared.
Regarding myocarditis, apologies if this has been reported before on NC, but I didn’t notice any discussion of it:
SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million Residents.
JAMA Cardiol. Published online April 20, 2022.
Okay, but if the mRNA vaccines are of questionable efficacy, then how do we assess the risks?
At the small post-secondary institution where I work, the triumph of magical thinking has been something to behold.
When the BC provincial government lifted masking and vaccine pass requirements last month, we fell into line immediately, although the largest university in the province announced that it would continue to require masking until the end of semester (& has just extended this policy into June).
Fortunately for me, this was my light teaching semester, and I was only running a small grad course where the students behaved without needing to be told. However, suddenly all kinds of meetings, special guest lectures, and social events were happening, often with food service, which means unmasking. Of course, I’ve given them a miss, so I don’t have direct observations of what the level of mask-wearing was, but 2nd-hand I hear that it was about the same as I see in the hallways (~ 50% or less).
I’m just about to leave to help out at an out-of-town field school, and after asking the instructor a bunch of questions, decided that I would book my own lodgings so that I could cook for myself and avoid the communal mealtimes. The instructor was quite understanding – except that I’m on the hook for this extra expense.
And then, in a couple of weeks, there’s a joint dinner of the two governing bodies of the school, something which had been an annual event pre-pandemic. Knowing the size of the crowd and the space where it will happen, I’m going to give this one a miss too, although I haven’t yet sent my formal regrets. I’m probably branded already as being high-maintenance, as I was the only member of one of those bodies who spoke out against our surrender on masking.
Gawd, this is getting tedious, though. I’m so close to retirement that I’m absolutely determined to stay healthy while I creep to the finish line – then I can be as much of a hermit as I want!
Here in Montreal, we are still supposed to be masked indoors until at least mid-May. On public transportation and in my university, about 90% are reasonably well masked with a good numbers of N99’s and N95’s. 10% are unmasked and giving the rest of us a big FU. No-one is enforcing mask mandates anymore. My university certainly is not.
We are in the midst of wave number 6, hospitalizations and ICU are going up, up and up. Let’s see if we get an Easter bump. The Quebecois are very big into family gatherings. Wave number 5 peaked in January, so this one is coming on early. It is very difficult to get a PCR test, so case numbers are meaningless.
Basically, everyone is saying let it rip and we must protect the economy at all costs. There is little discussion of long covid, although a sobering Quebec governmental study on incidence of serious long covid among infected health care workers came out recently. It found something like an incidence of fairly serious long covid of ~40%. This got some mention in the francophone press but not the Anglo press from what I saw.
This wave of covid has really ripped among the students at my university. I have two cases of long covid in my lab among healthy young men. A young grad student in my advanced stats class is quite ill. I am handing out incompletes like hotcakes this term.
We are supposed to be back to “normal” unmasked in the fall. Gawd help us. I am on sabbatical in the fall and intend to hide at home or to head up North on fieldwork. I taught remotely this term due to an unrelated medical condition, so I have dodged it so far. I too am considered “high maintenance”. I intend to stay masked with N95’s or N99’s. No-one wants to think about long-covid damage. This includes my chair and I fear my GP.
I wonder if I am nuts to be so careful. But then I look at what China is doing and I don’t think that Xi and company are incompetent. Strange days…
Pleased to know that I’m not alone. Some days it’s hard not to doubt yourself …
I forgot to mention that the upcoming event that I’m going to skip will have a featured after-dinner speaker who made his name in a biology specialty (biology fer petes sake!) before moving on to greater things in administration here and then back east.
Meanwhile, the politicized medical bureaucrats continue to award themselves with each successive wave that they bungle: https://twitter.com/bobmackin/status/1517358338345824257
At this rate, DBH is soon going to look like one of the Brezhnev-era Soviet generals, barely able to stand under the weight of all her medals!
May we somehow manage to stay safe, despite the best efforts of our leadership!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-woman-test-positive-twice-b2062261.html
A woman got infected with 2 different variants within 20 days ……
Statistically speaking, there must be people out there who have been infected twice simultaneously by different variants of this virus.
Perhaps the two cancels each other out as in fight poison with poison? Isn’t that the idea behind the inactivated virus vaccines?
Of course, and this is why we are up to XY now with the named recombinant lineages, and those have a minimum number of sequenced genomes cutoff to be assigned at all
In reality it has happened many thousands of times
IM Doc remarks on RSV are important in my opinion. Not that we might have a wild RSV or flu epidemic (well, regarding flu I have doubts, we will see), but new flu and RSV cases have a chance to be more severe compared with what we were used to see. This, because at population level immune responses to previous disease have almost certainly waned and susceptibility, at population level again, increased.
We will see.
Here’s another overview of the pandemic in BC, this one from Charlie Smith. He’s been doing yeoman’s work since the pandemic began, as has NC and the Covid brain trust. Thank you all! Sadly, he’s a voice in the wilderness. My wife and I put on the N95s before we leave the flat and they stay on unless we are outside. Mask wearing is increasingly rare in Vancouver from our observations. Except for essential shopping and services, we are living a very quiet life.
https://www.straight.com/covid-19-pandemic/news/10-proclamations-for-covid-unaware-including-members-of-bc-legislature
Another data point showing more cases per 100k in boosted than fully vaxxed and in some age ranges unvaccinated for the past 30 days.
This dashboard is updated every Tuesday.
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccination-outcomes.aspx.
In the past month, the multiplier for how many times people who are not fully vaccinated are more likely to test positive than boosted individuals has gone from 1.7x on 3/22 to 1.0x today 4/19.
For the case rates per 100k broken out by age range and vax status – boosted cases are still higher than fully vaxxed in all age ranges.
The cases are higher for boosted than unvaccinated in 3 age ranges now whereas before this week’s update it was only in two. The gap is slowly closing in 30-49 year olds.
Age 12-15
Boosted 10.7 per 100k
Fully Vaccinated 8.6 per 100k
Unvaccinated 9.0 per 100k
Age 16-17
Boosted 14.7 per 100k
Fully Vaccinated 9.7 per 100k
Unvaccinated 10.7 per 100k
Age 18-29
Boosted 36.8 per 100k
Fully Vaccinated 15.9 per 100k
Unvaccinated 27.6 per 100k
Age 30-49
Boosted 22.6 per 100k
Fully Vaccinated 10.2 per 100k
Unvaccinated 26.6 per 100k
All of the major statistical differences in outcomes between vaxxed and unvaxxed populations for hospitalizations and deaths are still in the over 50 age range and mostly coming from the 65+ population