Coronavirus, The Early December Edition
The Numbers: The day after my last report, the rate of daily new cases began surging. From increasing .6% per day to 3.5% per day. The doubling rate for .6% is 4 months. The doubling rate of 3.5% is just 3 weeks.
There is a statistical drop in the increases during the 5 days around Thanksgiving. The actual numbers wouldn't have dropped, but the accounting of them has. The Tuesday-Thursday numbers will probably show a commensurate jump.
Who are the infected?
The infected are still dominated by the 50+ crowd. See this image put out by Minnesota Health Services.
Another analysis by the New York Times is they are from counties with low vaccination rates rates as well. The same counties also happened to have voted strongly Republican in the last election. See Here...
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| These lines represent accumulative deaths for the year to date, not a snapshot of that point in time. So in January, they were very closely grouped, but as the vaccines took affect, the spread widened. |
Mentioned in the article, that the daily rate difference is growing.
I'll copy past the article snippet as my attempts to paraphrase is proving insufficient to explain properly:
"The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
Pfizer Covid Vaccine, 12-15's Year Olds
The Pfizer test on their vaccine against 12-15 year olds was 2,200 people. Of the 1,100 vaccinated, zero cases of Covid was reported. The Placebo group of 1,100 had 30 cases.
Misuse of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, hereafter referred to as VAERS, is a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines. It is being used by anti-vaxers to prove that the Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease.
The thing is, VAERS, is not statistical science. But more of an open source reporting system. In short, anyone can make a submission, some of the obviously false. The CDC does it's best to remove false claims, but for Covid reports alone this year, over 225,000 make this a daunting task.
But anti-vax attempts to "Game the system" is not the real problem,. It is just a blip in the numbers. The real problem is looking at the VAERS reports alone and deriving statistical conclusion. The system was meant as a trip wire for detecting early warning problems, and not a complete statistic outlook.
So when a popular anti-vax personality reported in May, 2021, that over 4,000 fully vaccinated people have died since taking the vaccine, as reported in VAERS, he was totally correct. But he was also totally misleading. What VAERS does not report is that reaction to the vaccine was a cause of death in all those 4,000.
At that point, 125 million Americans had been vaccinated, about 50%. Most of them were 50 years old or older. So out of 125 million, how many would be expected to die in a 5 month period of time? Roughly 700,000.See here.
The only surprise here is that only 4,000 were reported having been vaccinated.
Followup note. Listening to a podcast, "More or Less: Behind the Statistics", based in the UK. It was reported using statistics accumulated by the Office for National Statistics, ONS, that deaths for vaccinated was higher than unvaccinated. And it was another case of one data point on the chart being misrepresented to the whole of the chart. For details, listen to their podcast episode, "Simpson's Paradox, How to make vaccinated death figures misleading."
It has to do with disproportionate group sizes where the age group, 10-59, where the 55+ was disproportionately, by a factor of 80 times, affecting the group as a whole.
A analog would be a statistic that people that saw original Ghostbusters in the theater, are far more likely to have died than those that saw the latest remake. And drawing a conclusion that the older movie was killing more people.
The point is, the anti-vaccine refusenicks, are international, and will stoop to any level to justify their position, which is really just "I don't want to."
Omicron.
The latest variant of interest has assigned the Greek letter, Omicron. Since it was first reported earlier last week, I have seen articles that are almost copy paste's of previous variants, and others with often contradictory information.
But the the fact that B.1.1.529 (B means it is a variant of the South Africa variant) has been assigned a letter implies the powers-that-be are concerned.
What do we know? Extracted from NPR's article last week.
In areas of South Africa where it was first detected, Omicron has gone from extremely rare to dominating the number of cases in Pretoria in about 4 weeks. Omicron is now the leading cause in the current outbreak in South Africa.
The variant has been detected in just about every major country, including the US.
Is it a vaccine breaker? WE...DON'T...KNOW... Anything you read otherwise, is hyperbole. About 25% of the adult population has been vaccinated in SA, so there is a lot of potential unvaccinated population to spread in.
Is it deadlier? More infectious? WE...DON'T...KNOW... I don't have statistics for how dominant "South Africa" was in South Africa, nor do we know if Omicron will out pace Delta in the rest of the world.
The CEO of Moderna believes that existing vaccines will be "much less effective" dealing with Omicron. And I have to assume he is talking to the experts in the field, as a number of them work for him.
FYI, South Africa, like America and Europe, has had a serious drop off rate in their vaccination numbers. Their goal was 300,000 per day, and got close to achieving that goal in August since large shipments of the vaccine arrived, but has since dropped in half starting in September.
In two weeks, we will know a lot more.
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