SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

was spock before your time?

 

From NPR, some background and context on last month's Provincetown Mass. outbreak, which significantly changed medical guidance in the face of the delta variant. How it spread so rapidly, within the gay nightclub scene jam packed indoors due to poor outdoor weather, while celebrating an annual holiday festival while believing that the vaccine protected them. And how having been through a previous major epidemic (HIV-AIDS), they are much more open to vaccinations, sharing of health statuses, and contact tracings than is the typical public. And how citizen scientists among them tracked this down much quicker than the public health system / CDC alone would have.

How A Gay Community Helped The CDC Spot A COVID Outbreak — And Learn More About Delta

A Citizen Scientist Gave The CDC A Head Start In A COVID-19 Outbreak Investigation

 

That derives from a couple instances of this and similar:

Note that that death rate estimate was an overall average. It killed the young at a much lower rate, but seniors at a higher rate.

Then combine that with what we know about the older and milder coronaviruses that cause common colds (not all colds, roughly just 20% of them). Natural immunity to these doesn't last particularly long, and no vaccines exist (absent any yet-unknown crossover protection from the new covid-19 vaccines). As described and figured in prior threads over the past 18 months, a typical individual can expect to catch each of these common cold coronaviruses (four distinct varieties known) roughly 10 times per average lifetime.

If covid-19 behaves similarly, and no vaccines were available, then we could expect it to run rampant worldwide and strike most individuals repeatedly, every 5 to 10 years. Suddenly that "small" death rate risk starts compounding with each time a person catches it. The risk grows like compound interest, and gets worse each time due to a person's increasing age. This repeat disease risk would drastically shorten life expectancies. Last year alone, with only a partial disease cycle, whacked 1.5 years off the nation's life expectancy. A full cycle will be worse. Then repeating it 10x over a typical human life, would whack off many more years.

Or think of an analogous 'game', Russian Roulette, even though the risk numbers are different. Play it once, and a large majority survive. Play it 10 times, and few are left. While Covid-19 is much less risky overall, at least for the young and middle aged, it starts to get somewhat similar for seniors.

We don't yet know enough about Covid-19 to know if it would behave this way. But the possibility that it might, is why I see an anti-vaxx approach, or a let-it-run-to-natural-herd-immunity plan, as a path (or plan) to seriously decimate the senior population.

 

Vaccine Mandates Are Lawful, Effective and Based on Rock-Solid Science
Clear legal pathways exist to move the U.S. closer to herd immunity

Are these mandates lawful and ethical? The short answer is emphatically yes. And there is strong behavioral science evidence that mandates will be highly effective.

Businesses: Both the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have ruled that businesses may lawfully require workers to get a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of coming to the workplace. However, businesses must grant legitimate medical or religious exemptions. ... The private sector has wide discretion in setting conditions for workers and customers, and businesses have a legal and ethical duty to keep the workplace safe. ...

Federal and state governments: States have long had the constitutional authority to mandate vaccinations, which the Supreme Court has upheld twice, first in 1905 and then in 1922. The federal government, however, has limited power to mandate vaccines. It can only require them to prevent transmission of a dangerous infectious disease across state lines or international borders. The federal government has never sought to require nationwide vaccinations, and the courts probably would not allow it. ... But when governments act as employers, they would be in a similar legal position as businesses. Thus, federal and state worker COVID-19 vaccine mandates are fully lawful even under an EUA.

K–12 schools: Every state and Washington, D.C., require routine vaccinations, such as for measles, mumps and rubella, as a condition of school attendance. While state mandates vary, all are based on a long list of childhood vaccinations recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1922 the Supreme Court upheld school mandates, and all courts have recognized the states’ authority to mandate fully approved vaccines. Schools must offer medical exemptions for those who may be harmed by vaccines, but they do not have to grant religious or conscientious objections. ...

COVID-19 has been politicized like no virus before. From AIDS and tuberculosis to Zika, influenza and Ebola, states previously acted to enhance public health powers. A multitude of states are doing the opposite during this pandemic, tying the hands of health officials to act quickly and decisively.

 

Good to see California (most populated state) death rates still dragging the bottom of the scale.


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maine hospital outbreak, my worst nightmare:
37267841

 

The scale is missing in the image I see, so here is another:

 

U.S. COVID-19 death rate by state | Statista

California is in the low 30s by state.
Florida is #26

Of course, this is deaths per 100,000....which is why "the usual suspects" concentrate on NEW CASES using 1 virus particle detected per nostril as the determining viral load needed for a "case."

Science and data....

 

Interesting presentation. I can see the bar graph, but the "show sources information" link is paywalled for me.

Maybe it can be worked backward a little. It gives New Jersey's death rate (per 100,000 population) as 300.

New Jersey's population is 8.882 million, so 300 per 100,000 of that comes to 26,646 deaths.

Indeed, the Johns Hopkins COVID dashboard shows New Jersey with "26.6k" deaths as of 2021-08-08, cumulative over the entire history of US COVID disease. So those are the death rates this bar graph is showing.

That's not a false thing to show, as long as it's explained. But of course we remember that the top 'performers' in this picture achieved that very early in the story, when vaccines were a distant hope and even health providers couldn't get basic PPE.

Titling it "death rates from COVID-19" is arguably a bit misleading, as 'rate' often calls to mind a figure per period of time. These bars are simply all COVID-19 deaths ever reported for each state, divided by the population of that state.

It's a fine picture of what it's a picture of, but it is not a good way to see how the states currently compare in the effects of their decisions since vaccines and PPE have been widely available, which is the situation we're currently facing.

 

#26 is Florida's rank over the whole 18-month course of the pandemic.

When looking at NEW deaths, Florida's rank is :

 

all i want to know is hospitalizations and deaths, broken down by age and vaccination status. i believe this info is available, but not to the public

 

i'm actually impressed that texas is doing so much better than florida, but maybe it's the tourism.

 

So....if you disregard most of the data....Florida sorta sucks?

Funny how they break it down by state, huh?
How about counties?
....Age, and "other" demographics?

Or are we simply to regard JUST the data we're told to.

You get graded by how you do over the entire course.

 

i'd say it's the worst right now. but if you go by hospital capacity, it may only be close to worst

 

The lie they told us when they "locked down" the last time it was "worst" (last year) was that we had to "flatten the curve"

Then: It was "we have to keep ERs from overflowing into the parking lot"

What is it supposed to be NOW?
Zero deaths?
Deaths lower than a Chicago weekend?
Zero new cases?

Tell me which nation, state, county, or city "got it right...."

Most of the nation are not the "sophisticated vaccinated...."
We have to settle on being vaccinated....

Meanwhile....schools and families are still being disrupted by....."new"
When is "new" gonna get "old" ?

 

Bear Week Provincetown

Hundreds of Thousands of Bikers Expected in Sturgis Despite Delta Variant - The New York Times

 

It depends on what the purpose of the grading is, and what you choose to call a course.

There was a time early in the pandemic when there were no vaccines, no established treatment protocols, only the delayed very beginnings of public health measures, no PPE availability, and health providers were wearing trash bags and reusing soiled masks. The top 'performers' in that period were the earliest-infected dense population centers, and that could hardly have been otherwise.

That time has been replaced by a time with the necessary tools and knowledge in plentiful supply, and the 'laboratories of democracy' trying out some very different ways of applying them (or not).

An insistence on looking only at aggregated data from those two very different periods could be hard to explain on experiment-design grounds, unless the objective is to avoid seeing too clearly what the labs of democracy are finding out.

A curve that fits an exponential is a curve you don't want. When it's doing that, you'd better flatten it.

If you then, in your haste to forget any of it ever happened, let it go exponential again, you'd better flatten it again.

Consequence of exponential growth. Return of exponential growth in some places once again is overflowing ERs.

"Keep your rates subexponential and within your health-system capacity" still isn't a bad idea.