Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 20.1 % LOWER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago. U.S. hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are now 12.7 % LOWER than the rolling average one week ago. U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 2.9 % HIGHER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 104,015
- U.S. Coronavirus hospitalizations are at 84,233
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at an elevated 2,614 [are the new variants more deadly or are vaccinations increasing deaths – as deaths are not correlating with new cases or hospitalizations?>
- U.S. Coronavirus immunizations have been administered to 11.6 % of the population
- The 7-day rolling average rate of growth of the pandemic shows new cases improved, hospitalizations little changed, and deaths worsened
- Hopefully, these current improving COVID trends will remain in play even with the new strains
- What scientists know about variants and Covid-19 vaccines – do they slow the spread?
- AstraZeneca COVID jab ‘less effective against S Africa variant’
- Coronavirus cases are falling in the US but experts say it’s not from the COVID vaccine, yet
- The next hurdle in the U.S. vaccination campaign may be securing a second dose
- States are taking back unused Covid vaccine doses from nursing homes
- Climate change “may have played a key role” in coronavirus pandemic, study says
- Vaccine troubles overseas could haunt United States
- There was a U.S. housing crisis long before the pandemic. Now it’s worse
- Extraordinary Patient Offers Surprising Clues To Origins Of Coronavirus Variants
- New York releases updated data on state’s Covid-19 nursing home deaths
- Supreme Court blocks enforcement of some California COVID-19 rules for churches
The recent worsening of the trendlines for new cases is behind us which was attributed to going back to college/university, cooler weather causing more indoor activities, mutation of the virus, fatigue from wearing masks / social distancing, holiday activities, and some loosening of regulations designed to slow the coronavirus spread.
My continuing advice is to continue to wash your hands (especially after using the toilet as COVID first sheds in your stool), putting down the toilet seat (as flushing the toilet releases a plume), wear masks, avoid crowds, and maintain social distancing. No handwashing, mask, or social distancing will guarantee you do not get infected – but it sure as hell lowers the risk in all situations – and the evidence to-date shows a lower severity of COVID-19. In addition, certain activities are believed to carry a higher risk – like being inside in air conditioning and removing your mask (such as restaurants, around your children/grandchildren, bars, and gyms). It is all about viral load – and outdoor activities are generally safe if you can maintain social distance. Finally, studies show eating right (making sure you are supporting your immune system) and adequate sleep increase your ability to fight off COVID.
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Hospitalizations (grey line) and Mortality (green line)
source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html
Hospitalizations Are The Only Accurate Gauge As Reporting Is Not Affected By Holidays
The 4 day Thanksgiving holiday period put the first wobble in the trends. Over weekends and holidays, the number of new cases and deaths decline. Over weekends, this is not a problem for week-over-week rolling averages as weekends are compared against the previous weekend. But when a holiday falls within a working week, a non-working day is compared to a working day which causes havok in the trends.
However, hospitalizations historically appear to be little affected by weekends or holidays – the daily counts do not vary significantly from day-to-day.
The hospitalization growth rate trend is improving.
For the Thanksgiving and the end of the year holiday period – roughly, it seems each appears to have added around 5 % to the rate of growth of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Historically, hospitalization growth follows new case growth by one to two weeks.
As an analyst, I use the rate of growth to determine the trend. But, the size of the pandemic is growing in terms of real numbers – and if the rate of growth does not become negative – the pandemic will overwhelm all resources.
The graph below shows the rate of growth relative to the growth a week earlier updated through today [note that negative numbers mean the rolling averages are LOWER than the rolling averages one week ago]. As one can see, the rate of growth for new cases peaked in early December 2020 for Thanksgiving, and early January 2021 for end of year holidays – and the rate of growth is now contracting.
In the scheme of things, new cases decline first, followed by hospitalizations, and then deaths.
It is up to each of our readers to protect themselves and others by washing your hands, wearing a mask, avoiding crowds, and maintaining social distancing.
Will The New Variants Cause The Next Spike?
Maybe and maybe not. It all depends on vaccinations:
- the more people that are vaccinated reduces the pool of people that can be infected. Today we have removed over 11 % of the population from being infected which theoretically should reduce the infection rate by 11 % [it is unstudied whether the vaccines prevent a vaccinated person from being a carrier of the virus even though showing no signs]. If the vaccines are shown to stop transmission, then in theory it would reduce the infection rate by double the percent vaccinated [in this case you prevent your own infection and do not pass it along to another].
- it is also unknown what the effective rate of the current vaccines is against mutations that seem to appear almost daily. As an example, if the effective rate drops to 60%, it means the 11 % reduction in the infection rate discussed above is almost cut in half. The South African and Brazilian variant is somewhat immune to the current vaccines.
- The pandemic should be over immediately if everyone could be vaccinated today. The problem is that every day brings a new mutation (which would not appear if the pandemic was stopped). The longer the immunization process takes – the more ineffective the vaccine will become.
- It is not clear whether the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from spreading the virus. It seems to be well documented that it normally stops the virus from taking hold and when it does not – the infection is mild.
Coronavirus News You May Have Missed
Two posts were published today by Econintersect summarizing coronavirus news this past week:
There was a U.S. housing crisis long before the pandemic. Now it’s worse. – New York Times
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed that tenants who lost jobs during the Covid-19 crisis had amassed $11 billion in rental arrears; a broader measure estimated that as of January, renters owed $53 billion in missed rent, utility payments and late fees.
President Biden said the rental assistance in his $1.9 trillion relief plan was essential to keeping people from “being thrown out in the street.” But the aid might miss the most desperate, like Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario, above, who are improvising by moving into even more crowded homes, pairing up with friends and family, or taking in subtenants.
Democrats will begin drafting the wording of the aid package in the coming week and aim to speed it through the House by the end of the month.
Coronavirus cases are falling in the US but experts say it’s not from the COVID vaccine, yet – USA Today
New coronavirus cases are on the decline in the United States following staggering post-holiday peaks last month, but experts say it’s too early for new COVID-19 vaccines to be having an impact.
The positive trend also is not assured to continue, as new and more transmissible variants threaten to reverse it, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
“Although we have seen declines in cases and admissions and a recent slowing of deaths, cases remain extraordinarily high, still twice as high as the peak number of cases over the summer,” she said this week.
The decline in cases is likely due to a natural depression after record travel followed by indoor holiday gatherings triggered a surge in infections, said Dr. Sarita Shah, associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, the agency screened 1.9 million travelers the day before Christmas Eve setting a pandemic record.
“We’ve seen these rises and falls in the COVID case counts now a few times and they seem to really track along holidays or people’s movements,” Shah said.
COVID-19 symptoms take between two to 14 days to appear after exposure, and cases peaked exactly two weeks after the Christmas holidays, noted Brittany Baker, undergraduate program coordinator and clinical assistant professor at North Carolina Central University.
Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the falling case numbers can’t be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine as not even a tenth of the U.S. population has been vaccinated, according to the CDC. [editor’s note: over 11 % have been vaccinated]
… She said Americans may start to see the vaccine’s impact on case numbers as early as the summer, but it will be more evident in the fall.
Health experts also need to learn more about how the vaccine prevents COVID-19 spread before knowing how it will affect future case numbers, El-Sadr said.
[editor’s note: the experts seem to not understand that the spike in cases began in October – and was not related to holidays. Yes, the decline began in mid-January which seems to correlate to the end of the holidays. The issue I have now is WHY the death counts has not significantly declined. New cases decline first, hospitalizations follow a few weeks later, and deaths follow a few weeks later. Deaths counts should have been significantly falling this past week – and yet we saw the worst day since the pandemic began this past week. There is an unexplained reason affecting deaths.]
Vaccine troubles overseas could haunt United States – The Hill
“Even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a speech last month.
Tedros warned against the “me-first” approach to vaccinations.
“The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure, and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” Tedros said.
Experts argue that with the rise of new, more contagious variants, the U.S. will not be able to get back to normal until the rest of the world is also vaccinated.
“We live in a global community and if we really want to talk about true approaching normality, we have to attack this at the global level,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a recent Washington Post event.
“Because whenever there’s transmission and viral outbreaks throughout the world, the United States will always be at danger, no matter what we do,” Fauci said.
States are taking back unused Covid vaccine doses from nursing homes – CNBC
- Dozens of states and cities are diverting doses from a federal program to vaccinate long-term care facilities after the program over-estimated how many shots it would need.
- A combination of vaccine hesitancy, over-estimation of the number of doses needed for the campaign and other factors led to the program having too many shots, the CDC said.
- It’s not clear exactly how many doses are being diverted from the program, but Illinois, for example, announced this week that it was taking 97,000 doses out of the program.
New York releases updated data on state’s Covid-19 nursing home deaths – CNN
The New York State Department of Health has released updated data on Covid-19 deaths among the state’s nursing home residents, several days after a state Supreme Court judge ordered the department to fulfill a watchdog group’s Freedom of Information request.
The data released Saturday comes over a week after the state attorney general said in a report that the department had undercounted Covid-19 deaths among nursing home residents by about 50%.
Data released on the department’s website Saturday shows 13,197 confirmed and presumed-positive Covid-19 deaths of nursing home residents across the state from March 1, 2020 to February 5, 2021. Of those deaths, 4,080 occurred after a nursing home resident was transported outside the facility, the data shows.
The data reflect a slight uptick in the previously reported numbers. In a statement released last week in response to the attorney general’s report, state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said that, at that time, the health department had recorded a total of 12,743 confirmed and presumed-positive Covid-19 deaths among nursing home residents through January 19 — 3,829 of which occurred outside nursing home facilities.
Extraordinary Patient Offers Surprising Clues To Origins Of Coronavirus Variants – Goats and Soda
Back in the spring last year, a 45-year-old man went to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston because of a COVID-19 infection. Doctors treated him with steroids and discharged him five days later.
But the COVID infection never went away — for 154 days. “He was readmitted to the hospital several times over the subsequent five months for recurrence of his COVID-19 infection and severe pneumonia,” says infectious disease doctor Jonathan Li at Harvard Medical School who helped to treat the man.
“So this is an extraordinary individual,” Li says.
So extraordinary in fact, that this man’s case is offering scientists surprising clues about where the new coronavirus virus variants emerged, and why they’re causing explosive outbreaks on three continents.
To be clear here, the man wasn’t what doctors call a “long hauler,” or a person who clears a COVID infection and then continues to have health problems for months. This man had living, growing virus in body for five months, Li says. The same infection lasted for five months.
“That is one of the remarkable aspects of this case,” Li says. “In fact, he was highly infectious even five months after the initial diagnosis.”
This man had a severe autoimmune disease, which required him to take drugs to suppress his immune system. So his body couldn’t fight off the COVID infection as well as a healthy person. He would get better for a while and then the virus would counterattack. He would fall sick again. Eventually, he ended up in the ICU. He passed away five months after the initial diagnosis.
Throughout the man’s infection, Li and his colleagues ran an illuminating experiment. Every few weeks, the team extracted coronavirus from the man’s body and sequenced the virus’ genome.
Li couldn’t believe what they found. “I was shocked,” he says. “When I saw the virus sequences, I knew that we were dealing with something completely different and potentially very important.”
The sequences showed Li and his team that the virus was changing very quickly inside the man’s body. The virus wasn’t picking up just one or two mutations at a time. But rather, it acquired a whole cluster of more than 20 mutations. Scientists had never seen SARS-Cov-2 mutate so quickly during the whole pandemic.
What scientists know about variants and Covid-19 vaccines – STAT
There is now real evidence that at least one coronavirus variant seems to elude some of the power of Covid-19 vaccines. What, exactly, that means for the pandemic is still being sussed out.
Even if the vaccines are less powerful against the variant, they still appear to protect people from the worst outcomes, like hospitalization or death. But the loss in efficacy against the B.1.351 variant in clinical trials suggested to some experts that the immunity the shots confer may not last as long against that form of the coronavirus. Or that the vaccines won’t be as powerful of a drag on transmission, the way scientists hope the shots will be for other versions of the virus.
More urgently, experts said, the disparate results serve as a warning flag that the world needs to step up its current vaccination campaigns and expedite efforts to envision what Covid-19 vaccines 2.0 might look like.
The good
Key questions about vaccines sometimes get reduced to whether they “work” or not against the different forms of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But that oversimplifies what clinical trials are measuring, what the vaccines might be able to do, and how much of this is a matter of degrees, not a yes-or-no answer.
The trials have generally been investigating whether the vaccines prevent symptomatic cases of Covid-19. But Covid-19 presents across a full spectrum, from asymptomatic infections to fatal ones, which is why some trials also include data specifically focused on the outcomes people most want to prevent: severe disease and death.
In a way, the first clinical trial results from Moderna and the Pfizer and BioNTech team, which both showed the respective vaccines were 90% or more protective against symptomatic disease, spoiled us for what we could expect for immunizations still going through trials. The achievements went way beyond what experts had hoped Covid-19 vaccines could hit.
So when Johnson & Johnson reported last week that its vaccine was, on average, 66% efficacious at blocking moderate and severe disease — a figure that ticked up to 72% when just looking at U.S. participants — many researchers sought to remind people that this was a result worth celebrating. The vaccine was 85% effective against severe disease cases no matter the infectious variant, and all the deaths and hospitalizations in the trial occurred among people who got the placebo, not the vaccine.
“People look at 72% and say well that’s not as good as 90%, but the fact is, if you look at serious disease, it was extremely effective in preventing serious disease, including hospitalizations and deaths,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters this week.
The not so good
Simply, clinical trial data released last week for the J&J shot and another from Novavax showed the vaccines did not fare as well in South Africa, where the B.1.351 variant first emerged and has circulated at the highest levels.
The efficacy of the J&J shot against moderate or worse Covid-19 fell to 57% in South Africa, while Novavax reported its vaccine was 49% effective in South Africa at preventing symptomatic Covid-19. In a separate trial in the United Kingdom, Novavax’s shot was nearly 90% efficacious. (Another variant on the global radar, B.1.1.7, first emerged in the U.K., and while it is more transmissible, so far it doesn’t seem to have as significant of an impact on vaccines.)
Beyond the drop in protection, some experts said the results indicated the vaccines might be less powerful against B.1.351 in other ways, too.
Clinical trials haven’t shown whether any of the existing vaccines can slow the spread of any iteration of SARS-2, but many experts think the shots will offer some help in that arena, whether because they prevent some infections entirely, or because they make people who still contract the virus less contagious for a shorter time, or some combination of factors.
[editor’s note: this post hard to summarize and deserves a full read]
Climate change “may have played a key role” in coronavirus pandemic, study says – CBS
Human-caused climate change “may have played a key role” in the coronavirus pandemic. That’s the conclusion of a new study which examined how changes in climate have transformed the forests of Southeast Asia, resulting in an explosion of bat species in the region.
The researchers found that, due to changes in vegetation over the past 100 years, an additional 40 species of bat have moved into the region, carrying with them 100 more types of bat-borne coronaviruses. Bats are known carriers of coronaviruses, with various species carrying thousands of different types. Many scientists believe the virus that started the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic originated in bats in southern China’s Yunnan province or neighboring areas before it crossed paths with humans.
These findings have scientists concerned about the probability that climate change will make future pandemics more likely.
Supreme Court blocks enforcement of some California COVID-19 rules for churches – USA Today
A divided Supreme Court late Friday blocked enforcement of California’s prohibition on indoor church services during the coronavirus pandemic, the latest case in which the justices have been asked to assess measures intended to slow the spread of the virus in light of religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.
South Bay United Pentecostal Church, a 600-seat congregation near San Diego, had filed an emergency request asking the high court to block enforcement of some COVID-19 provisions, including a prohibition against all indoor services in some parts of the state as well attendance limits in others. The 1,250-seat Harvest Rock Church had filed a similar challenge to the state’s rules.
A 6-3 majority blocked the state from prohibiting indoor services in counties with the greatest spread of COVID-19, but it allowed attendance caps based on the size of the building to stand. The state may also continue to prohibit singing and chanting during those services, the court said.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that federal courts owe “significant deference” to politically accountable officials in public health matters, but said that deference has its limits.
“The state’s present determination – that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero – appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake,” Roberts wrote.
The next hurdle in the U.S. vaccination campaign may be securing a second dose. – New York Times
In some American states, people who have received their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine have been experiencing maddening difficulties as they try to schedule their second.
In New Hampshire, officials said this week that they were switching scheduling systems for second-dose appointments after some people were given slots on dates that were past the time frame recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Connecticut, some frustrated older adults were waiting to have their second doses scheduled after getting their first shot, The Connecticut Mirror reported.
The problems are pronounced in Washington State, where some residents are anxiously scrambling for second-dose appointments because of scheduling systems that do not always simultaneously schedule appointments for both doses.
AstraZeneca COVID jab ‘less effective against S Africa variant’ – Aljazeera
The COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford appeared to offer only limited protection against mild disease caused by the South African variant of the coronavirus, a spokesman for the British drugmaker has said.
The statement on Saturday came after the Financial Times reported that the vaccine failed to prevent mild and moderate disease caused by the variant first identified in South Africa.
The newspaper cited early data from a trial conducted by South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Oxford, the findings of which are due to be published on Monday.
The FT noted that none of the more than 2,000 mainly healthy and young participants in the trial had been hospitalised or died. The findings are yet to be peer-reviewed.
Responding to the FT report, an AstraZeneca spokesman said: “In this small phase I/II trial, early data has shown limited efficacy against mild disease primarily due to the B.1.351 South African variant.
“However, we have not been able to properly ascertain its effect against severe disease and hospitalisation given that subjects were predominantly young healthy adults.”
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Beijing has approved a second Chinese Covid-19 vaccine — a drug made by the private company Sinovac Biotech that will be distributed to developing countries — in a move that furthers the country’s efforts to be a global player in ending the pandemic.
Germany is discussing how to help BioNTech and other Covid-19 vaccine makers secure production capacity and raw materials, the country’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said on Twitter on Saturday. Vaccine shortage in the European Union is a growing crisis, adding pressure on the E.U.’s chief executive, Ursula von der Leyen.
No plans for a Covid-19 vaccine passport in the UK, minister says
Canada extends cruise ship ban to 2022. That’s bad news for Alaska tourism, too
Beijing tells local governments to ease overly strict travel curbs for Lunar New Year
Israel’s handling of coronavirus seems like a success. Residents tell a different story.
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Can snowbirds get their COVID vaccines in Arizona?
Kroger will pay workers $100 to get vaccinated
Congress mulls tightening eligibility for stimulus checks
Man Says Airline Removed Him From Flight for Wearing Special Mask
Coronavirus testing in the U.S. is declining. Experts aren’t sure why.
Moderna is asking U.S. regulators to allow it to increase the amount of vaccine put into each vial by as much as 50 percent. The upstart drugmaker says it can raise the doses per vial to as much as 15 doses from 10. The F.D.A. could decide within a few weeks if the company can up the dosages.
More than a week after Philadelphia cut ties with a Covid-19 testing and vaccine provider, Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley testified that it was a “mistake” to allow Philly Fighting Covid (PFC) to operate vaccine clinics. The city severed its ties with PFC amid reports the non-profit shifted to a for-profit entity. There were also concerns over PFC’s patient data collection and protection practices.
Iowa governor lifts mask requirements
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 07February 2021
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 07February 2021
Job Seekers Beliefs And The Causes Of Long-Term Unemployment
Warning to Readers
The amount of politically biased articles on the internet continues to increase. And studies and opinions of the experts continue to contradict other studies and expert opinions. Honestly, it is difficult to believe anything anymore. A study usually cannot establish cause and effect – but only correlation. Be very careful what you believe about this pandemic.
I assemble this coronavirus update daily – sifting through the posts on the internet. I try to avoid politically slanted posts (mostly from CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post) and can usually find unslanted posts on that subject from other sources on the internet. I wait to publish posts on subjects that I cannot validate across several sources. But after all this extra work, I do not know if I have conveyed the REAL facts. It is my job to provide information so that you have the facts necessary – and then it is up to readers to draw conclusions.
Analyst Opinion of Coronavirus Data
There are several takeaways that need to be understood when viewing coronavirus statistical data:
- The global counts are suspect for a variety of reasons including political. Even the U.S. count has issues as it is possible that as much as half the population has had coronavirus and was asymptomatic. It would be a far better metric using a random sampling of the population weekly. In short, we do not understand the size of the error in the tracking numbers.
- Just because some of the methodology used in aggregating the data in the U.S. is flawed – as long as the flaw is uniformly applied – you establish a baseline. This is why it is dangerous to compare two countries as they likely use different methodologies to determine who has (and who died) from coronavirus.
- COVID-19 and the flu are different but can have similar symptoms. For sure, COVID-19 so far is much more deadly than the flu. [click here to compare symptoms]
- From an industrial engineering point of view, one can argue that it is best to flatten the curve only to the point that the health care system is barely able to cope. This solution only works if-and-only-if one can catch this coronavirus once and develops immunity. In the case of COVID-19, herd immunity may need to be in the 80% to 85% range. WHO warns that few have developed antibodies to COVID-19 when recovering from COVID-19. Herd immunity does not look like an option without immunization although there is now a discussion of whether T-Cells play a part in immunity [which means one might have immunity without antibodies]
- Older population countries will have a significantly higher death rate as there is relatively few hospitalizations and deaths in younger age groups..
- There are at least 8 strains of the coronavirus. New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States.
- Each publication uses different cutoff times for its coronavirus statistics. Our data uses 11:00 am London time. Also, there is an unexplained variation in the total numbers both globally and in the U.S.
What we do or do not know about the coronavirus [actually there is little scientifically proven information]. Most of our knowledge is anecdotal, from studies with limited subjects, or from studies without peer review.
- How many people have been infected as many do not show symptoms?
- Masks do work. Unfortunately, early in the pandemic, many health experts — in the U.S. and around the world — decided that the public could not be trusted to hear the truth about masks. Instead, the experts spread a misleading message, discouraging the use of masks.
- Current thinking is that we develop 5 months of immunity from further COVID infection.
- The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have an effectiveness rate of about 95 percent after two doses. That is on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. The 95 percent number understates the effectivenessas it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, only one contracted a severe Covid case.
- To what degree do people who never develop symptoms contribute to transmission? Research early in the pandemic suggested that the rate of asymptomatic infections could be as high as 81%. But a meta-analysis, which included 13 studies involving 21,708 people, calculated the rate of asymptomatic presentation to be 17%.
- The accuracy of rapid testing is questioned – and the more accurate test results are not being given in a timely manner.
- Can children widely spread coronavirus? [current thinking is that they are a minor source of the pandemic spread]
- Why have some places avoided big coronavirus outbreaks – and others hit hard?
- Air conditioning contributes to the pandemic spread.
- It appears that there is increased risk of infection and mortality for those living in larger occupancy households.
- Male patients have almost three times the odds of requiring intensive treatment unit (ITU) admission compared to females.
- Outdoor activities seem to be a lower risk than indoor activities.
- Will other medical treatments for Covid-19 ease symptoms and reduce deaths? So far only remdesivir, Bamlanivimab,
and Regeneron) are approved for treatment. What drugs work? Arthritis drugs tocilizumab and sarilumab could cut relative risk of death of those in intensive care by 24%
- A current scientific understanding of the way the coronavirus works can be found [here].
There is now a vaccine available – the questions remain:
- how effective it will be in the general population,
- will there be any permanent side effects that will appear months from now,
- how long immunity will last [we can currently say we do not know if it will last more than 4 months],
- there is no evidence the vaccine will block transmission
Heavy breakouts of coronavirus have hit farmworkers. Farmworkers are essential to the food supply. They cannot shelter at home. Consider:
- they have high rates of respiratory disease [occupational hazard]
- they travel on crowded buses chartered by their employers
- few have health insurance
- they cannot social distance and live two to four to a room – and they eat together
- some reports say half are undocumented
- they are low paid and cannot afford not to work – so they will go to work sick
- they do not have access to sanitation when working
- a coronavirus outbreak among farmworkers can potentially shutter entire farm
The bottom line is that COVID-19 so far has been shown to be much more deadly than the data on the flu. Using CDC data, the flu has a mortality rate between 0.06 % and 0.11 % Vs. the coronavirus which to date has a mortality rate of 4 % [the 4% is the average of overall statistics – however in the last few months it has been hovering around 1.0%] – which makes it between 10 and 80 times more deadly. The reason for ranges:
Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these estimated ranges to better reflect the larger burden of influenza.
There will be a commission set up after this pandemic ends to find fault [it is easy to find fault when a once-in-a-lifetime event occurs] and to produce recommendations for the next time a pandemic happens. Those that hate President Trump will conclude the virus is his fault.
Resources:
- Get the latest public health information from CDC: https://www.coronavirus.gov .
- Get the latest research from NIH: https://www.nih.gov/coronavirus.
- Find NCBI SARS-CoV-2 literature, sequence, and clinical content: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sars-cov-2/.
- List of studies: https://icite.od.nih.gov/covid19/search/#search:searchId=5ee124ed70bb967c49672dad
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