Coronavirus, The End of the Year Edition

 Coronavirus, The End of the Year Edition

By the Numbers

 

The Numbers:

The Omicron surge has been breathtaking.  From being identified to dominance in the US in under 5 weeks.

On 12/29, there were a mind numbing 465,082 new cases in the US.  Shattering the previous record of 312,939 the day before, which beat the previous the all time high logged in on 1/8/21 and is growing by 7.3% per day for the last week.  It brings the estimated number of cases to 3.9 million coming into the New Year.  

 

Pennsylvania broke its record new case number of  13,318 (12/11/2020) by over 4,000 yesterday.  And New York shattered its previous 1 day record of 18,664 last January with 43,131 Tuesday, and again with 67,226 yesterday.

 

There is no sugar coating this.

 

Omicron update:

Just hours after my previous posting.  Significant information from South Africa.

1) Full but not boosted vaccination with Pfizer drops protection down to 33% for Omicron compared to closer to 60%+ vs Delta and over 80% vs Alpha, Beta, or ancestral (IIRC), but protection vs hospitalization appears to be a 70% reduction vs unvaccinated against Omicron.

2)Those who previously contracted Delta appear to have a 40% risk of reinfections, 60% for Beta, and older/original strain 73%.

3) Adults seem to have a 29% lower risk of hospitalization, particularly if a reinfection.

4) Children appear 20% more likely to require hospitalization.  While most experience 3 days of cold like symptoms, others are hospitalized for bronchitis and pneumonia.

Why is Omicron so infectious?:
One study by the Ragon Institute, demonstrates that Omicron replicates 70 times faster then Delta in the bronchial tubes.  That alone would explain how it is out competing Delta.  While in the broncs, it is much easier spread from patient to patient with each breath.

Why does Omicron seem less dangerous?:

In the lungs, Omicron seems to replicate only 1/10th as fast as Delta.  So it seems to set up well in the door way (the bronchial tubes), but doesn't penetrate deeply into the major systems like lungs, heart, kidneys.

If you have been exposed:

I have had my first encounter with someone who tested positive for Covid.  Despite putting out these missives bi-weekly, my experience with Covid has been more theoretical than real.  

First, thank the person that called you that you have been exposed.  While some regard this as a common courtesy and obligatory, others will avoid the unpleasantness and hope for the best.  Give them some positive reinforcement.

In my case, the person that called was not the infected contact, but was also contacted by him/her.

Testing false positives are rare.  False negatives are more common.  If you test too soon, there may not be enough pathogens to be detected. 

 

The best time to test is two or three days after exposure to someone who has the virus.  In my case it was 4 days on notification, 5 to testing.  My test was negative, so I dodged the bullet.

 

So if you were exposed yesterday, you can make arrangements for a tomorrow or the day after, but today is too soon.

With the new wave of Omicron, testing centers are overwhelmed.  Doctors office's are refusing patients without a current test,  Take your temperature, self isolate and be patient.  

If you are a veteran, the VA seems to have capacity to test right now.  

 

The day after my test, my sister called me to say that she might have been exposed the previous week as well.  I didn't have contact with her directly, but had a 90 minute conversation with her husband.  

 

So 5 people contacted in total, and two possible Covid infections.

 

In the end, it is just probability. 

The year in review.

I decided to look at last years final missive and see what we got right, and what went wrong.

The drug Bamlanivimab, a monoclonal antibody drug was announced and shown to be effective.  This specific drug had been approved, then later revoked in the US.  A recent test on the drug was canceled in Denmark when it's efficacy against placebo was statistically irrelevant.

 

But other monoclonal drugs are effective against Covid, but this is the most expensive way to treat the virus.  Several shots at 3-5,000, and are effective for about a month.

 

Last Christmas Eve, there were around 5 million active cases.   The highest daily new case count was 254,000 on December 18, 2020.  The high for that surge, which was the Alpha Variant, was 301,000 on Jan 8.

The vaccine rollout had started, and the production schedule was tracking for 190 million Americans vaccinated by June.  We hit 135 million partially and fully vaccinated on May 25, 2021.  Currently we are at 240.

Anaphylaxis from the Covid vaccine was 1 in a million with the test group, but was about 10 in a million in real life.  Anti-vaxers will bring this up, ignoring that Covid will kill 2,500 per million.

Long Term Impact of Covid damage still is an under studied effect.  Last year vascular damage was between 35% and 70% of patients examined. The current number is thought to be 30%.  But we won't really know until much later.

 

“Herd Immunity” was estimated at 80% of the population.  For the USA, that is 265 Million.  We are still not there yet. 

 

It would be amusing if it wasn't so wrong:

A conspiracy group held a convention, "ReAwaken America", on Dec 10th.  This large number of this mostly unvaccinated group started having fever, chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, fatigue.  

Since Covid is just a conspiracy put out by the pharmaceutical companies, with the collusion of every government and medical system in the world, their logical conclusion is that they were subjected to an anthrax attack.

 

You can't make this stuff up. 

 

Update, Jan 3, 2022.  One of the infected members, Doug Kuzma, after 5 days of being ill, replied to a suggestion that he have a Covid test with, "no way"!  It was just his chronic bronchitis, or maybe anthrax. But either way, there was a photo of himself with a container of Ivermectin.  Is Ivermectin a proper treatment for anthrax?

He was found unconscious at his home on Christmas Eve, was hospitalized, and died 10 days later.

What went wrong?:

Obviously, the strength of the misinformation of the anti vaccine people was underestimated.  It was thought they would be ploughed under by the realities of the situation to the anti-vaxer's natural 3-5% of the population and be irrelevant.

 

No one saw that the pundits of a major political party would attack the efforts to save lives as contrary to all that was good and decent in their world view.

 

But the truth is, it's something else.  Its not the Republican banner wavers, though that is how it manifests itself in the USA (vaccination rate 73%).  In the UK (vaccination rate 76%), they have the same issues.  Often with the same arguments.  But this was largely the Tory party, their equivalent of the Republicans, and they took their cue from Boris Johnson, who's politics and attitudes is so close to Trump as to not matter.  But to the rest of the world, American foreign policy is just UK foreign policy extended.   In short, one is just like another.  

But what about France (vaccination rate 78%)?  They are having riots over vaccinations and restrictions.  And they were practically ground zero in 2020.  Germany (vaccination rate 71%) also has a strong resistance to the remaining people being vaccinated.  Their mantra seems to be "Vaccinated, recovered or dead."

All western nations, but with different cultures.  All having trouble getting over the critical threshold percentage needed to put the brakes on Covid.  

Many anti-vaxers are fed arguments attacking the science. They will listen to "Dave" on the internet, vice take their information from actual scientists who are authorities on the work.

 

They will point out that the science is inconsistent, and  therefore "Dave" is right, and none of it can be trusted.

But they will latch on studies that have failed the peer review process or haven't been replicated that reflect their world view.  Like one study showing efficacy of Ivermectin, which failed peer review, and ignored 50 other studies that showed no efficacy.  They attribute it to the conspiracy and ignore the evidence.

 

And while it is considered amoral to experiment on humans, Brazil experimented with Ivermectin on a country wide scale, mixing it with HCQ, and some vitamins and calling it "First Response", and not allowing the vaccines to be imported.  The result is the second highest body count in the world.  Sad to say, but that is also science. 

 

So we have a woman preaching that if God meant us to cover our faces, he would have given us a mask, reading from her prepared statement required her to have on her reading glasses.

I think the core of problem is a secondary school education issue.  Somehow the sciences are being reduced, and people just don't know how the scientific method works.  

They argue that the scientists are biased, have an agenda, or on a payroll, or any number of human behavior issues.  And they are absolutely correct.

People are imperfect.  That is why there is the scientific method.

If you do a study, or produce an extraordinary result in an experiment.  You have to write it all up, and subject it scrutiny.  Other scientists may have an opposing agenda, and will want to destroy it.  They will tear into the documentation and do their best.   If they succeed, the experiment will have to be redone, addressing any issues.  If they fail, we have a conclusion.  Other scientists that don't have a dog in the fight will make popcorn and read the results and come to a consensus.

It's called an adversarial relationship.  It is how science works.  It's also how the court system works.  It's how the US Government works.  It's ugly and brutal.  But it gets at the facts of the matter.  

When you read a headline that "Scientists disagree on <this or that issue>".  This is ALWAYS true.  

When someone says, "Well, not all of them believe that."  This is also ALWAYS true.  But then, there are people that believe in flat earth.  

There are always people that will not believe what is right in front of them.  But it is a failure of the education system when the percentage is so high.  In Pennsylvania, that percentage seems to be 40%.  Plenty of fertile ground for the anti-vax agenda, and unfortunately, wood for the Covid fire.

I'll put this out as an analogy.  Galileo and the Pope.  Which could be defined as new ideas vs. the status quo.  Or the scientific method vs. ignorance.  Galileo didn't just do experiments, he wrote them down, and subjected them to scrutiny, and replication.  And his observations took root in countries beyond the Papal reach.  

 

The church had to dig in it's heels because if the Catholic church, which was considered infallible, was wrong about heliocentric model of the solar system, then what else could it be wrong about?   Ignorance won out on the short run, but the scientific method on the long run.

 

This came up again with evolution.  Missing species had been in evidence for centuries.  They couldn't have died out, because that would mean God created imperfect things, which means God himself was imperfect.  So it was thought extinct species were just, "Elsewhere".  But by the late 1800's, it was obvious that the Stegosaurus wasn't hiding behind the arborvitae.  160 years later, we still have many who deny it, which is 'ok', but some actively point to fraudulent evidence "demonstrating" that man and dinosaurs coexisted at one time.

A final note:

Donald Trump, while being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, announced his vaccination status as vaccinated and boosted.  Bill O'Reilly also made the same announcement and they both recommended everyone get the jab.  He even noted that most of the Covid hospitalized were from the unvaccinated.  They were booed from the audience.

In a later interview, Bill O'Reilly basically said the conspiracy nuts were in the stratosphere with their theories and they were wrong.

For example a Ms Candace Owens, a journalism school drop out, how claims that Trumps vocal support for vaccinations is based on his inability to use the internet to do, "proper", research.  She stated that, "He only knows what is written down, or read to him."  

 

Failing to notice that for a while, those writings were from the most prominent virologists in the land.  Doctors that actually completed college, and then some.  Then went on to spend a life time studying the medical sciences.

So Ms Owens, what qualifies you to "do" research?  Based on what I have seen of your writing, you didn't even pass, like, proper sentence structure.  To quote her, 'People oftentimes forget that, like, how old Trump is,'.  Has she read even one formal research paper on vaccine efficacy?  Or is she just repeating echo chambers?  

And you all know I would rather amputate a significant toe rather than say something good about our dear departed leader.

But he is right about getting vaccinated.