Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 22.0 % LOWER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago. U.S. hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are now 13.9 % LOWER than the rolling average one week ago. U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 2.6 % LOWER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 83,321 [lowest number since late October]
- U.S. Coronavirus hospitalizations are at 69,283
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 3,361 [there has been little real decline in deaths since the peak]
- U.S. Coronavirus immunizations have been administered to 15.1 % of the population
- The 7-day rolling average rate of growth of the pandemic shows new cases marginally worsened, hospitalizations improved, and deaths worsened
- Hopefully, these current improving COVID trends will remain in play even with the new strains
- The variant first detected in Britain is most likely deadlier than the original virus variants
- Can Frozen Food Spread The Coronavirus?
- Hospitals face severe shortage as pandemic grinds forward
- Take whatever COVID vaccine you can get. All of them stop death and hospitalization
- F.D.A. officials say their ‘flawed’ policy led to a flood of unreliable antibody tests early in the pandemic
- The challenges of antiviral treatments
- ‘Hidden homeless crisis’: After losing jobs and homes, more people are living in cars and RVs and it’s getting worse
- A new child tax credit expansion could provide monthly income. Some question whether the help is too much or too little
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 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 15 % of the population from being infected which theoretically should reduce the infection rate by 15 % [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 15 % 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
Econintersect published two articles that review the news of the past week:
The challenges of antiviral treatments – Knowable
And for people with Covid-19, there’s just one approved for use: remdesivir, which doesn’t seem to save lives, but speeds recovery in those who do get well. Clearly, more antivirals would be nice to have — so why don’t we have them? Inventing them, it turns out, is not so easy.
Viruses rely on human cell machinery to copy themselves, so antiviral designers face a challenge: how to stop the virus without damaging the inner workings of healthy cells too. While scientists have found several solutions to the problem, the antiviral pharmacopeia still lags behind the plethora of antibiotics available to treat bacterial infections.
But as researchers build up their knowledge of viral life cycles, antivirals may be poised to catch up. Scientists are also planning for future pandemics, in the hopes of having a better selection of antivirals to try the next time around.
Here’s where antivirals stand today, and how the list might be growing.
How do antivirals work?
An antiviral drug can block any of the steps a virus uses to copy itself. To do its dirty work, a virus must attach to a host cell, sneak inside and trick that cell into copying viral genes and crafting viral proteins; after that, the newly made viruses must escape to infect new targets. At each step, viral genes or proteins need to interact with various host molecules, and each of these interactions offers an opportunity for antiviral drugs. The drugs often mimic those host molecules and act as decoys to interfere with the viral life cycle and reduce its spread.
A common approach is to interfere with the copying of viral genes into DNA or RNA to form new viral genomes. Viruses frequently have their own versions of proteins, called polymerases, for this task. The polymerases add individual building blocks called nucleotides, one by one, to the new genome as it’s being built.
Most of the antiviral drugs being tested against the SARS-CoV-2
[editor’s note: This article is worth a full read]
Americans are being driven into their vehicles by pandemic-fueled woes. And their ranks are likely to grow as the government safety net frays and evictions and foreclosures rise.
“It’s in times of crisis that the fragility of our systems are laid bare,” said Graham Pruss, a postdoctoral scholar with the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the UC San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations.
Even before COVID, millions struggled to afford a decent place to live. The pandemic has made the housing crisis even worse, says Pruss.
He expects a surge in the number of people without permanent homes taking refuge in cars, vans, RVs and campers – and not just in the nation’s most expensive regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area where vehicles have increasingly become a form of affordable housing, but all over the country.
“We have seen more people moving into vehicles and more restrictions on public parking for them over the last decade, and then COVID hit,” Pruss said. “I am concerned that we may be facing a population increase in mobile sheltering and vehicle residence at unprecedented levels.”
Nearly one in 500 Americans is homeless, mostly on the West Coast and in the Northeast, according to estimates. Homeless advocates say people without permanent housing are chronically undercounted. It’s even harder to track the tens of thousands of people living in their vehicles rather than on the streets or in shelters because they must move around so much.
“Vehicle residency is one of the fastest-growing forms of homelessness,” said Sara Rankin, associate professor of law and director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at Seattle University.
Like with every measure of homelessness and poverty, people of color are disproportionately represented among vehicle dwellers as the pandemic exacerbates racial gaps in financial and housing security, she says.
Black Americans, multiracial Americans, Hispanics and Latinos are far more likely to be homeless than the national average and than white Americans, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Last year, a Housing and Urban Development report found that Black people make up nearly half of the homeless population, yet comprise only 13% of the population.
Hospitals face severe shortage as pandemic grinds forward – The Hill
Hospitals around the country say their supplies of crucial personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical supplies are lower than ever as demand for different items has soared to an all-time high.
Data detailing usage rates of PPE and other supplies analyzed by Premier, a company that consults for health care systems, revealed that usage of supplies for COVID-19 testing and treatment has reached the highest rate seen since the pandemic began last year.
The data, gathered between May 2020 through January 2021, was supplied by 50 health care systems across the nation that are representative of the company’s larger population of clients.
PPE shortages first emerged last March, with officials in several states warning that they did not have enough supplies to adequately protect health care workers from being infected themselves.
Among the items seeing the highest demand as a result of surging COVID-19 hospitalizations through January include sterile water, which is used in many injections including the Remdesivir treatment former President Trump received as part of his COVID-19 treatment regimen at Walter Reed Medical Center last year.
Usage of sterile water is up 350 percent from rates seen last May, according to Premier’s data, and hospital inventories have dropped an average of 50 percent.
Pipette tips and micro pipettes, used during the COVID-19 laboratory testing process, are also seeing higher demand than last year. Usage of pipette tips spiked to a more than 100 percent increase over last May during the holiday season in November and December before falling slightly in January, though it still remains at a far higher rate than hospitals reported early last year.
Hospital systems are also reporting these supplies much harder to find as of January, with the average delivery time for pipette tip orders jumping from a few days to nearly a month.
The variant first detected in Britain is most likely deadlier than the original virus variants, scientists say. – New York Times
British government scientists are increasingly finding the coronavirus variant first detected in Britain to be linked to a higher risk of death than other versions of the virus, a devastating trend that highlights the serious risks and considerable uncertainties of this new phase of the pandemic.
The scientists said last month that there was a “realistic possibility” that the variant was not only more contagious than others, but also more lethal. Now, they say in a new document that it is “likely” that the variant is linked to an increased risk of hospitalization and death.
The British government did not publicly announce the updated findings, which are based on roughly twice as many studies as its earlier assessment and include more deaths from Covid-19 cases caused by the new variant, known as B.1.1.7. It posted the document on a government website on Friday.
The reasons for an elevated death rate are not entirely clear. Some evidence suggests that people infected with the variant may have higher viral loads, a feature that could not only make the virus more contagious but also potentially undermine the effectiveness of certain treatments.
A Democratic proposal to expand the child tax credit for one year could give qualifying families up to $300 per child per month.
But like all direct payments made by the government as part of Covid relief, some are questioning whether the aid will be too much or too little.
One of the strongest objections to the Democrats’ proposal came from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who wrote in an op-ed this week that it is “not a pro-family policy, no matter how much Democrats will claim it to be.”
The child tax credit expansion is aimed at reducing child poverty. Research has indicated President Joe Biden’s plan could help cut today’s rate in half, particularly for minority families.
Still, others like Rubio are skeptical.
“If pulling families out of poverty were as simple as handing moms and dads a check, we would have solved poverty a long time ago,” Rubio wrote.
As with other direct payments, such as stimulus checks, the debate on how the child tax credit is structured has focused on whether those who are hurting the most financially will truly benefit.
Some experts say the Democratic plan could also enrich those at the top of the qualifying income thresholds.
The child tax credit helps parents under certain income thresholds financially provide for their children.
Today, it amounts to $2,000 per child for those who earn up to $400,000 if they are married and $200,000 if single.
Because it’s a tax credit, it lets parents reduce their federal tax liability. (This is not to be confused with a deduction, which lowers adjusted gross income.)
House Democrats’ proposal, which was released this week, calls for raising the credit to $3,600 per child under age 6, and $3,000 per child for those up to and including age 17.
The bill would make it so families can opt to receive payments monthly, instead of having to wait for one lump sum at the end of the year. Families could receive up to $300 per month per child under 6 and $250 per month per child ages 6 to 17.
Investigators from the World Health Organization looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in Dec. 2019 than previously thought. They are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has so far not let them examine.
The lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time that there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December.
The team also had a chance to speak to the first patient Chinese officials said had been infected, an office worker in his 40s with no travel history of note, reported infected on Dec. 8.
The slow emergence of more detailed data gathered on the WHO’s long-awaited trip into China may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease that the virus may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.
Embarek, who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN:
“The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding.”
He explained that Chinese scientists presented his team with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in Dec. 2019. Of these, 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient’s symptoms.
Embarek said it was possible this larger number – of likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on – meant the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that December.
As little as 13% of people who get the coronavirus develop symptoms, a new study suggests – Business Insider
One of the coronavirus’ most dangerous characteristics is that infected people commonly pass it to others before they know they’re sick — or without ever developing symptoms at all.
Scientists continue to try to track the rate of asymptomatic coronavirus cases hidden in the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that around 40% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, and a study last month found that about 50% of transmission comes from people without symptoms.
Now, a new study suggests asymptomatic cases might represent a large majority of infections. Researchers at the University of Chicago created a model that incorporated antibody tests taken in New York City from March to April, the city’s recorded cases from March to June, and changes in New York’s testing capacity during that time.
The results suggested that just 13% to 18% of COVID-19 cases were symptomatic — between one in five and one in seven.
“There are a lot of asymptomatic people — much larger than many studies have assumed,” Rahul Subramanian, one of the study’s authors, told Insider.
Can Frozen Food Spread The Coronavirus? – Goats and Soda
At a news conference this week, the World Health Organization made a surprising statement: The coronavirus could possibly transmit on frozen packages of food.
“We know that the virus can persist and survive in conditions that are found in these cold and frozen environments,” says Peter Ben Embarek, the food scientist who led the World Health Organization team that traveled to China to investigate the origin of the pandemic. “But we don’t really understand if the virus can then transmit to humans.”
Embarek went on to say that scientists need to investigate further this possible route of transmission – and that frozen meat, perhaps frozen wild meat, could have sparked an early outbreak of COVID-19 last year at the Huanan Seafood market in Wuhan.
“There were definitely frozen meat and seafood sheltered at Huanan, some of it probably farmed wildlife,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, who was also part of WHO’s team in China. “But there was a lot else going on at the market, as well.” For example, there were also stalls selling fresh seafood and wildlife. And, Daszak says, the outbreak could have started from an infected vendor or customer. “We are keeping every option on the table and trying to keep an open mind about it.”
Chinese scientists have linked several outbreaks in the country last year to frozen packages of meat or seafood. In particular, an outbreak in Beijing last summer centered around a massive wholesale market, called Xinfadi Market.
Scientists found live coronavirus on a package of frozen cod fish there. They also found signs of the virus inside the packaging, Daszak says, suggesting the package became contaminated where the frozen food was packed.
“It was a good bit of detective work,” Daszak says.
[editor’s note: also read: Did the coronavirus really come from frozen food, as the WHO suggests?]
Take whatever COVID vaccine you can get. All of them stop death and hospitalization. – USA Today
Almost every day, we get the same questions from family, friends, and strangers who happen to find our emails: Which COVID-19 vaccine should I get? Should I wait to get the “best” vaccine?
Johnson & Johnson has followed Moderna and Pfizer with an application to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization of its vaccine. Novavax and AstraZeneca might not be far behind. Not surprisingly, people are concerned about getting the “wrong” vaccine when they hear that some are 66% effective while others reduce infections by 95%.
Our advice is simple: Take whatever vaccine is offered to you. Right now, all of the vaccines are the “best.” This is what we’re doing for ourselves.
The varying “effectiveness” rates miss the most important point: The vaccines were all 100% effective in the vaccine trials in stopping hospitalizations and death.Waiting for a more effective vaccine is actually the worst thing you can do to lower your risk of getting severely ill and dying of COVID-19.
No death or serious illness in 7 trials
We do not vaccinate to prevent a minor case of the sniffles. The reason we have vaccines is to prevent severe disease and death caused by infections. The polio vaccine prevents paralysis. The measles vaccine prevents pneumonia, brain infections and blindness. Annual influenza vaccines prevent pneumonia, sepsis and heart attacks. If COVID-19 only caused a cold, we would not have bothered to develop vaccines for it. While there are many mild cases of COVID-19, about a fifth of infections result in severe disease, and nearly 1% of infected people die. For older people and those with underlying health problems, the risk of death can be anywhere from 10 to several hundred times higher.
All seven COVID-19 vaccines that have completed large efficacy trials — Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, AstraZeneca, Sputnik V and Sinovac — appear to be 100% effective for serious complications. Not one vaccinated person has gotten sick enough to require hospitalization. Not a single vaccinated person has died of COVID-19.
Not all infections are equal. People who are vaccinated against viruses still occasionally get infected. But thanks to a vaccine-primed immune system, the infections never progress to make them seriously ill. The vaccine efficacy rates vary only with respect to mild forms of COVID-19 illness. When it comes to the measures that really matter — hospitalizations and death — they are all functionally the same
F.D.A. officials say their ‘flawed’ policy led to a flood of unreliable antibody tests early in the pandemic. – New York Times
Two officials at the Food and Drug Administration said on Saturday that they had erred by allowing manufacturers to sell Covid-19 antibody tests that had not been proved accurate, flooding the United States with unreliable blood tests early in the pandemic.
The officials, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren and Dr. Timothy Stenzel, said in an essay published in The New England Journal of Medicine that the F.D.A.’s guidance on March 16, 2020, which allowed companies to sell tests without emergency use authorization, “was flawed.”
Within two weeks of that guidance, 37 manufacturers told the F.D.A. that they were introducing the tests in the United States, a number that swelled to 164 by the end of April, the officials said. Many of those tests turned out to be inaccurate, and by May the F.D.A. demanded that companies submit data that proved that their tests were reliable or they could be banned.
As of this month, the officials said, the F.D.A. had issued 15 warning letters regarding the tests, removed references to 225 tests from its website and issued “import alerts” regarding 88 companies, meaning their imported tests will receive additional scrutiny — and could be blocked — at the border.
“Our experience with serology tests underscores the importance of authorizing medical products independently, on the basis of sound science, and not permitting market entry of tests without authorization,” they wrote in the essay, referring to the blood tests. “Knowing what we know now, we would not have permitted serology tests to be marketed without F.D.A. review and authorization, even within the limits we initially imposed.”
Soon after the tests first appeared in the United States, scientists discovered that many were flawed, even as some government officials and employers were saying the tests could be crucial to easing restrictions imposed during the pandemic. One review, which was not peer-reviewed, found that of 14 tests on the market, only three gave consistently reliable results.
Many others gave false positive results, signaling that someone had already been infected with the coronavirus and had a heightened level of protection when that was not the case. Even some of the most effective tests did not detect antibodies in 10 percent of people who actually had them.
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
White House: China Must Release Data From The ‘Earliest Days Of The Outbreak’
China slams US after it raised concerns about WHO investigation in Wuhan
Auckland locking down for three days after unexplained virus cases discovered
Germany implements tighter border restrictions in fight against virus variants
After China warned against Lunar New Year travel, millions apparently stayed home.
Peru has a new health minister after a vaccine scandal forced the previous one to resign.
A French mayor defies coronavirus orders and opens museums
Dozens of UK politicians call on prime minister to end lockdown by end of April
Saudi Arabia extends Covid restrictions for 20 days
Two Israelis Contract South African Strain After Recovery
Japan formally approves its first COVID-19 vaccine
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Should young Americans get vaccine before elderly?
Migrant workers: We caught COVID and were fired
Cuomo Didn’t Protect Seniors. But it Was the Media That Covered It Up
Vaccinations are picking up in the United States, but big challenges remain.
The televangelist Frederick K.C. Price has died at 89 of complications from Covid-19.
Montana becomes the latest state to undo its mask order.
CVS and Walgreens have a chance to make Covid vaccine rollout more equitable
More than 50 million vaccine doses administered in the US, according to CDC
CNA Nursing Home Whistleblower: Seniors Are DYING LIKE FLIES After COVID Injections! SPEAK OUT!!!
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 14February 2021
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 14February 2021
COVIDs Long Shadow: Social Repercussions Of Pandemics
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 studymers Expect Higher Spending and Home Prices Improvement
January 2021 Small Business Optimism Drops Further Below Historical Index Average in January
Infographic Of The 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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