U.S. Covid death toll hits 1,500 a day amid delta scourge
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https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Confirmed deaths:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The ratio of the two, case fatality rate:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
You can see the massive drop off earlier this year when the vaccines became massively available. Since then, we've been tracking the upper bound of normal. Not great, but probably not bad considering all of the follow on effects of stress, isolation, closing down routine medical exams, job loss, business loss, and many other assorted things that also contribute to excess mortality.
For comparison, you can see the 2017/2018 flu season impact on excess mortality in the same chart.
[0] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
Tbh I now see our society as a memetic organism and I think the cleansing of people who don’t understand reality is just a part of the process at this point.
It's so deadly it requires misinformation to kill people? Why do you think it's taking years for the public to reach consensus, if this is such a threat?
banning misinformation might work short term, but longterm i suspect it will further harm things... long term credibility needs to be won back the hard way me thinks...
The Miami Herald reported that a change in methodology has created an artificial gap distorting things:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25379689...
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444288-how-many-floridi...
Governor DeSantis and the Florida DOH have fired back, saying it's all political lies.
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/454618-ron-desantis-cov...
Other people in Florida State government are clearly opposing DeSantis, for instance:
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/444317-nikki-fried-dire...
I think that while DeSantis and the DOH may well be technically correct that the new method of reporting statistics is objectively more accurate in the long run, that doesn't mean that it isn't causing a distortion downstream, where it looks like nobody's dying on the most recent days, even though they are.
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Year on year risk
1. Pick an area with good covid stats. The google data on cases/hospitalizations/icu/deaths will do
2. Compare the stats for each with the numbers exactly one year ago. You may be surprised to find that unless the country is Qatar, every number will be worse than year on year. Including hospitalizations, icu and deaths
Like other respiratory viruses, SARS-Cov-2 is seasonal. You may recall that last year around this time, Florida and Texas had big waves before the north. And America had a big wave before Europe. Europe declared victory late summer 2020.
This is a surprising conclusion. Going into winter we appear to be in a worse position compared to last year.
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Relative vs. Absolute Risk of severe disease post vaccine
Here’s another exercise. Most reading this are likely vaccinated, as am I. You surely read that this vaccination has ~95% efficacy against severe disease. Great! I’ll take those odds. But what do they mean in absolute risk terms?
Let’s say that last year your local area had 1,000 cases a day, and had the wild type variant. At that level you had a certain risk tolerance. Now, relative to unvaccinated you back then, you have a 20x lower risk. But, it is 2021:
1. Delta seems to have a 2x odds ratio for hospitalization (source below). Oops. Your absolute risk reduction is only 10x.
2. Your local area has more cases now. See the first exercise. So if your area has 5x more cases, a typical multiple, then your absolute risk reduction for severe disease compared to same time last year is only 2x less. Oops.
Now, your peak risk will probably stay lower, as in a lot of places it is implausible that peak caseloads will hit 5x their peak loads. Among other things, ICU capacity would break before then. But this exercise is still valueable, as the merely relative protection of vaccination is unintuitive.
Oh, and the risk of an unvaccinated person compared to same time last year? 10x more! That preserves 95% efficacy.
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No one knows the future. Maybe these waves all peak, we hit the happy land of immunity as a herd, and we have a normal future.
But I say it is futility to declare victory over a respiratory pathogen until your country makes it through at least one winter with the level of restrictions you’d like. Summer is easy mode.
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Sources:
1. Delta hospitalization. This is actually relative to alpha, which may itself have had a higher hospitalization odds ratio relative to wild type: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/sars-cov...
2. Country stats. For quickly checking a country, google is fastest. But they generally pull from our world in data, which is the best aggregator: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
There have been three peaks so far, roughly January, May, and late August.
So I guess it's seasonal, if by seasonal you mean it's cycled in winter, spring, and summer so far.
Nothing before last winter compared to the three peaks we've had since. So we really have no information on a yearly cycle, especially since vaccination, however it plays out, has affected 2021.
Graph:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (Daily New Cases)
The late August peak has been a southern US phenomenon, seemingly associated with going inside during warm months for air conditioning. The south states were the ones that peaked early both years. Israel also had an early summer peak last year, associated with a heat wave.
In states and countries where people go outside, it is a strong bet that viral transmission will be stronger in the months when coronaviruses are seasonally strong.
In the US, things picked up in July and appear to be peaking now. Which is not November.
Conversely, globally, cases were at a lull as March began and near peak by May.
I'm not saying I can predict the future, but so far, I don't think the pattern you see exists.
>The late August peak has been a southern US phenomenon
I think that's a misleading way to put it, unless you accidentally wrote August when you meant May.
The late August peak is in the global stats, which I linked to.
What seems different for the US is that the spring wave was very attenuated and doesn't show up hardly at all in a graph. We essentially have had two big peaks and not three.
You can’t exclude variants either. Alpha was more contagious and got around the world by May, so that trumps seasonality. The May wave also began march/april and peaked later. But for any given variant it would be extremely unusual to see highest activity in summer not winter.
No one ever went back to pre-HIV, we still use condoms. We just don’t let people die of it quite so easily anymore. But there was never a moment where HIV has stopped being a problem or having ended the possibility of non-deadly unprotected sex. Maybe COVID is the same - we will remember the pre COVID days as this wonderful time where we didn’t have to shoot RNA onto our arms every six months.
I think it would still be feasible for the rich world to do in spring 2022, when it is warm season again, if we get tired of this. It could then be maintained with border agreements. We don’t accept endemic tuberculosis even though that is airborne.
The other thing that would make it easier would be if we actually started acting in the knowledge that it is airborne. We have treated SARS-Cov-2 as a droplet and fomite disease. This has meant we avoid easy and effective solutions (HEPA, open windows, co2 monitors, N95) in favour of inconvenient and ineffective solutions (six feet rule, hand washing, no hugs, deep cleaning). You’re infinitely safer giving a hug and holding breath for a couple seconds (if you choose) than going into an unventilated meeting six feet apart.
(I wash my hands of course, but it is a colossal error to make that the centerpoint of public health advice)
Pretty much every country that aimed at elimination achieved it pretty easily! Or at least for less aggregate effort than countries aiming at mitigation. For some reason we chose the latter.
If you have a sincerely held belief that is controversial, then it's helpful to provide information about why you hold the belief and how you came to reject some other consensus.
The widely documented superspreader events are impossible to explain by droplet or fomite transmission. Literally impossible. You think an infected bar patron goes around within 6 feet of 80 other people and shakes their hands or breathes on them?
224 people were infected at this Quebec city gym. Aerosol is the only viable mechanism to do that: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/superspreading-event-canada-m...
Here’s a couple articles summing things up:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airbo...
Airborne particles are indeed in the CDC FAQ; I don't know how far back that goes.
And yes, if you have a virus that cam infect 245 people in the gym through the air, then ventilation is more important than handwashing. I’m not sure anyone has even established evidence for fomite spread! I expect it is a mechanism too but the point is it has been treated as default for some reason despite lack of evidence and evidence for other methods.
The Delta variant took over in the US around the beginning of July.
Doesn't the type of spread you are harping on mainly pertain to Delta?
If so, then the CDC was anticipating it a month or more in advance; that doesn't seem like a belated response.
Isn't the R0 of tuberculosis way lower than the R0 of COVID, especially the delta variant?
We do lots of work to contain it.
If you knock down its ability to cause severe disease by a factor of 20 or so and it becomes just another viral pneumonia, then we don't have a pandemic any more.
If everyone would just get vaccinated, we'd be there and it'd be over by now. Doomerism is counterproductive and doesn't help that.
The UK is in summer, snd the virus is still spreading at near record rates with 94% adult immunity. On what basis do you believe it to be like the flu?
This isn’t doomerism btw. My position is SARS-Cov-2 likely isn’t livable, and we should eliminate it. Multiple societies have succeeded at it. Readily possible.
Maybe the winter will prove you right, but if it doesn’t I’m hoping people will come round to actually trying to get rid of the thing. Basically every country that tried to succeeded. It’s possible. Frankly the people who say we can’t beat it seem like the pessimists to me.
https://gizmodo.com/whopping-94-of-adults-in-england-have-co...
And kids count and I really mean 100%. Also, if 20 year olds only have an 80% rate due to less vaccine uptake it'll still spread in that subpopulation of the UK and the near 100% vaccination rate of 80 year olds doesn't affect that spread because 80 years old aren't at the nightclubs where 20 year olds are spreading the virus.
Also obviously if kids under 16 in the UK only have a seropositivity of ~20% due to no vaccination then the virus will happily spread in that reservoir, particularly through the schools where kids are in close proximity to hundreds of other kids, before "hopping back" into adults. Much like a reservoir species (which incidentally is the reason why eradication of this virus is impossible)
Regarding animal reservoirs, has there been a single confirmed or suspected case anywhere? Especially in a place that had transmission, like Wuhan, or Nova Scotia. Or with good contact tracing like South Korea. That’s certainly possible, but I don’t know it’s proven to be a certain problem. You’d expect lower animal transmission if it wasn’t rampant in humans too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8
In the case of the mink cluster 5 there were confirmed cases of the mink-adapted SARS-CoV-2 genome in infected workers on the farms.
Without similar genotyping its impossible to say if there's other similar events happening with other species, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects enough other species to be considered promiscuous.
On the basis of existing evidence I think it’s premature just to give up and say it’s impossible, without having tried.
I'd love it if we'd just give up entirely world-wide on mink farming already, but eradicating wild species is a non-starter.
And we will likely never even identify all the species out there which could be reservoirs. You'd need to fully survey African nations and we still can't figure out where Ebola is coming from.
There's going to be many times more species of animals that can be infected and be reservoirs of this virus that we don't know about than we do know about. And all those species in Africa count every bit as much as the minks closer to home.
I MEAN EVERYONE
https://i.imgur.com/fTTBLia.gif
100%, Including kids under-12.
The one thing delta really changed was that we're all either getting vaccinated or getting infected and recovering.
What we're doing now is dragging it out while the virus burns through the unvaccinated population still trying to flatten the curve to keep the hospitals from getting knocked over.
We could have no restrictions tomorrow if everyone were fully vaccinated today.
I believed this for the 2 months or so that mask mandates and other restrictions only applied to people who weren't fully vaccinated.
First of all, there will be no 100% vaccination globally.
Second of all, variants will continue to emerge while we play wack a mole. Yes, in the vaccinated.
Never mind potential animal reservoirs.
That won't escape T-cells recognition to the currently circulating strain of the virus. Once everyone is vaccinated or recovered the disease burden of any future strain will go down by an order of magnitude at least.
This is what happened with H1N1 which became endemic as simply seasonal influenza. After being displaced in 1957 by H2N2 it circulated in pigs for 50 years before jumping back into humans in 2009 -- but people born before 1957 still had cross-reactive T-cell immunity to the H1 protein of that virus. Existing human coronaviruses now just cause the common cold, even though HCoV-OC43 may have caused the last great pandemic of the 19th century with the 1889 pandemic.
These respiratory pandemics all burn out as they transition to endemic spread and nearly everyone gains cross-reactive immunity to future strains.
That's a lot of claims.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457446/
Complete Genomic Sequence of Human Coronavirus OC43: Molecular Clock Analysis Suggests a Relatively Recent Zoonotic Coronavirus Transmission Event
If so what you are seeing is Simpson's paradox. The same data when broken down by under 50 and 50+ gives 91.8% and 85.2%. Breaking it down even farther by age group gives:
12-15 100%
16-19 100%
20-29 100%
30-39 96.8%
40-49 93.9%
50-59 92.8%
60-69 88.7%
70-79 89.6%
80-89 81.1%
90+ 92.4%
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
Covid is a new “flu” type endemic disease. We’ll manage it, hopefully.
(according to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm )
EDIT: to fix the logic.
Always extrapolate from the now!!!