Coronavirus, End of July, 2024

Coronavirus, End of July, 2024

 By the Numbers

The Numbers: 

There has been a number of news reports on an increase in Covid cases.  This is born out in the statistics on the number of hospitalizations from Covid.  From a low of 1.1 hospitalizations per 100,000 population in April, to the current 2.5 last week.  

Peak for the year was the first week in January at 7.6.  For a comparison, the peak for last year was 7.7, in Dec, 2023, and 10.9 in December, 2022.

Source Covid-19 hospitalizations here...

The number of weekly deaths has been around 330 since May, down from 500 in the April/May time frame, and 2,500 in January.  See here...

And where is Covid increasing?  Here is a link to the wastewater tracking information...  This chart used to be more localized "dots" on a map, but now it is just state by state. 

Dominant Variants in the US:

Various KP's, 62%

LB.1  17.5

Various JN.1.X's  7%

Per CDC tracker...

A Covid Cannabis Risk Factor?

Between 2/1/2020 and 1/31/2022, UW Health(Wisconsin and Illinois area) asked anyone that showed up at their hospitals with Covid a few questions.  One was had you used cannabis (ingested or smoked) at least once in the previous last year.  They also asked about smoking. The sample looked at 72,000+ Covid cases.  Of which 51,000 were hospitalized, 4,700 were sent to the ICU, and 2,700 died..

The results were that the cannabis users were 1.8 times more likely to have needed hospitalization, and 1.27 times more likely to need ICU over non cannabis users. For Smokers was 1.72 and 1.22.  

From JAMA... 

From what I understand, cannabis use has been associated with suppression of the immune system.  So this would be a correlation to that.

From NCBI...

 

Have You Seen This Gene?

In 2021 UK researchers intentionally infected 16, unvaccinated, but otherwise healthy people with Covid to study how the disease progresses. Of them, only 6 contracted the disease.  Of the 10 remaining, 7 never tested positive at all.  3 never felt sick, but tested positive.  

These 10 had an "high expression"* from the gene, HLA-DQA2.  Noted was an immediate interferon response in the nasal passages.  The 3 that never felt sick had interferon response in their blood.  Sick individuals took up to 5 days for the interferon response to show up.

See the BMJ...

So if you have never gotten Covid, it could be your genetics.

*what does "high expression" mean?  I have no clue.