Written by Steven Hansen

The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 19.2 % LOWER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 17.7 % HIGHER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:

• U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 21,980
• U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 643
• U.S. Coronavirus immunizations have been administered to 86.9 doses per 100 people.
• The 7-day rolling average rate of growth of the pandemic shows new cases worsened and deaths worsened
• Here’s the Most Interesting Thing in the CDC Data About Post-Vaccine COVID Breakthrough Infections
• Canada – Physicians Forbidden From Questioning Official Health Guides
• Joe Biden Believes China Hiding COVID-19 Origin Info, China Warns ‘Political Virus’ Spreading
• We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End
• Fact check: No definitive evidence COVID-19 vaccine causes autoimmune disease
• Fact check: COVID-19 variants come from mutations, not vaccines
• Simple at-home taste test could predict duration and severity of SARS-CoV-2 symptoms
• GI Symptoms and Chronic Fatigue May Persist Months After COVID-19

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Hospitalizations Are The Only Accurate Gauge

Hospitalizations historically appear to be little affected by weekends or holidays. The hospitalization growth rate trend continues to improve.

source: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_3.html

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 it now shows that the coronavirus effect is improving.

In the scheme of things, new cases decline first, followed by hospitalizations, and then deaths. The potential fourth wave did not materialize likely due to immunizations.

Coronavirus News You May Have Missed

Here’s the Most Interesting Thing in the CDC Data About Post-Vaccine COVID Breakthrough Infections – PJ Media

When you look at the CDC’s report as of the end of April, it is explicit:

A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40-74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died. Among the 995 hospitalized patients, 289 (29%) were asymptomatic or hospitalized for a reason unrelated to COVID-19. The median age of patients who died was 82 years (interquartile range = 71-89 years); 28 (18%) decedents were asymptomatic or died from a cause unrelated to COVID-19.

Let’s take the rough estimate found in California and Minnesota as 40%. Today, the CDC reports that there were 588,421 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. If 40% of those were hospitalized or died with COVID-19, as some have post-vaccination, the number would be more like 353,053. If, as the New Jersey study found, 89% of these people were near the end of life due to illness or frailty, that would mean there were under 40,000 deaths from COVID-19 that could be considered unexpected or warrant further investigation.

Why is the CDC so scrupulous in tracking post-vaccine deaths from COVID-19? They take pains to delineate those who are hospitalized or die with it, rather than because of it. Obviously, we need accurate data on post-vaccination risks. However, shouldn’t the specific risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 have been communicated to the public during the pandemic? The frequent legacy media guests did not provide this and very few curious reporters attempted to frame it.

The above are indeed rough estimates. However, if we are ever to get an accurate picture of this pandemic, a deep dive must be done. This recalibration will require hospital chart audits for a statistically significant number of patients who reportedly died of COVID-19 in the tracking. If the estimates from California, Minnesota, and New Jersey are even in the ballpark, this must never happen again. Pandemic planning needs to put controls and data collection systems in place to ensure that it does not.

Early in the pandemic, Imperial College modeler Neil Ferguson told the British Parliament the following:

“We don’t know what the level of excess deaths will be in this epidemic,” Ferguson said. In other words, we don’t know the extent to which COVID-19 will increase annual deaths above the level that otherwise would have been expected. “By the end of the year, what proportion of those people who’ve died from COVID-19 would have died anyhow?” Ferguson asked. “It might be as much as half to two-thirds of the deaths we’re seeing from COVID-19, because it’s affecting people who are either at the end of their lives or in poor health conditions. So I think these considerations are very valid.”

Physicians Forbidden From Questioning Official Health Guides – Mercola

• The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), which regulates the practice of medicine in Ontario, has issued a statement prohibiting physicians from making comments or providing advice that goes against the official narrative
• According to CPSO, physicians in isolated incidents have been spreading blatant misinformation via social media, which is undermining “public health measures meant to protect all of us”
• The physicians were threatened with investigation and disciplinary action should they speak out regarding the many inconsistencies and questions surrounding pandemic lockdowns, masks and COVID-19 vaccines
• Clapping back at CPSO’s blatant overreach, a group of Canadian physicians sent out a declaration calling for the statement’s recission and describing it as “unethical, anti-science and deeply disturbing”

We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End – Insight

Frankly, I think the United States and United Kingdom, and most of Europe, will mostly be fine. That’s true even with all the hesitancy around vaccines, especially since the most vulnerable group — the elderly — are highly vaccinated. (Right now, about 85% of seniors in the United States have had at least one dose, and that number is bolstered by some amount of the older population that has been infected in the past year).

And yet, as we can see in India, Nepal and elsewhere, this is far from the case in the rest of the world. I think we overly focused just on waiving patents (long story: I think it was partly muscle-memory from the HIV/AIDS crisis, when that would have been a fine solution) as a solution to getting the rest of the world vaccinated. That is not sufficient for this pandemic. Vaccine production is hard, and merely waiving the patents is like the “thoughts and prayers” politicians express after tragedies, after which they do little or nothing and the tragedy continues unabated.

Officials from all nations that produce vaccines need to gather for an emergency meeting immediately to decide how to commandeer whatever excess capacity they have to produce more, through whatever means necessary. Because of the threat of increased transmissibility, and since the evidence at hand indicates that all of the vaccines, even the Chinese and Russian versions, appear to be highly effective against severe disease or worse, the focus should be on manufacturing and distributing the highest number of doses possible as fast as possible.

If the choice is between no vaccine and any vaccine, the precedence should go to whatever can be manufactured fastest, regardless of patents, nation of origin, or countries prioritizing their allies or wannabe allies.

But here we are. It is increasingly likely that most of the deaths from this pandemic will happen even after we got the vaccines, and even after we either did or could have had enough vaccines to prevent severe outcomes among the most vulnerable around the world.

Fact check: No definitive evidence COVID-19 vaccine causes autoimmune disease – USA Today

The claim first appeared early in the pandemic and persisted thanks to Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician and anti-vaccine advocate based in Cleveland.

“Some people are going to die from the vaccine directly,” Tenpenny said in a February interview. “But a large number of people are going to start getting horribly sick and get all kinds of autoimmune diseases, 42 days to maybe a year out.”

A month later in a different interview on the evangelical Daystar Television Network, Tenpenny cites a January study as evidence supporting her linkage of the two. And Facebook posts echoing Tenpenny have shared excerpts of this purported paper.

… The claim that vaccines can provoke autoimmune diseases predates the current pandemic and is a tactic long used by opponents to discredit vaccines.

Despite numerous studies looking for associations between the two, “no (vaccines) have consistently been shown to cause autoimmune disease,” the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said on its website.

Other studies investigating childhood vaccines — like for the human papillomavirus, or HPV — as risk factors for developing type 1 diabetes in children found no association. Other studies found no cause-and-effect relationship between vaccines and celiac disease, an autoimmune condition triggered when eating gluten, or vaccines and autoimmune neurological disorders.

In the study referenced by Tenpenny, researchers were investigating whether the virus that causes COVID-19 — not the vaccine — could cause autoimmunity, said Aristo Vojdani, one of the study’s co-authors.

The study predates the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“There are at least ten different articles that were published in scientific journals with similar findings that the SARS-CoV-2 may cause autoimmunity,” Vojdani told USA TODAY via email. “When we did the study, (the COVID-19) vaccine did not exist.”

[editor’s note: Note that if truth were a matter of voting – there is no truth that autoimmune disease has any relationship to vaccines. Thank God we now know the world is not flat, but there was a time this was true. Keep an open mind and manage your risks. The same sentiment holds true for the next post on variants.]

Fact check: COVID-19 variants come from mutations, not vaccines – USA Today

Public health officials are monitoring five variants of COVID-19 circulating in the United States, all of which appear to spread more quickly than the original strain. Scientists say those variants are the product of coronavirus mutations spurred by its continued spread.

But online, an alternative explanation for the variants has taken hold. Its source: a Nobel laureate who helped discover HIV.

“Bombshell: Nobel Prize Winner Reveals – Covid Vaccine is ‘Creating Variants,'” reads the headline of a May 18 article from RAIR Foundation USA, an activist organization whose stated goal is to “combat the threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”

… Public health officials say coronavirus variants are the result of changes to the virus’s genes. Every time a virus replicates, mutations naturally occur in its genetic material.

When RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 circulate widely within a population, they change and adapt over time. One example is flu viruses, which change so frequently that a new vaccine is needed each year.

Since the pandemic began, the coronavirus has infected more than 169 million people worldwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That high caseload, as well as its geographic distribution, has given the virus ample opportunity to mutate, experts say.

“If you think about a virus like a tree growing and branching out, each branch on the tree is slightly different than the others,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website. “These small differences, or variants, have been studied and identified since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Coronavirus vaccines can help slow the evolution of the virus.

All three vaccines approved for emergency use in the U.S. are effective at reducing the spread of the coronavirus. As more Americans have received the vaccine, new COVID-19 cases have declined. That means the virus has fewer opportunities to replicate, mutate and produce new variants.

Perlman said there’s no evidence the COVID-19 vaccines will make variants worse in the long run. New variants emerge through the process of natural selection when that strain is the one strong enough to overcome a host’s immune system.

Simple at-home taste test could predict duration and severity of SARS-CoV-2 symptoms – News-Medical

A JAMA Network Open research paper published today (26 May 2021) by Doctorpedia contributor Henry P. Barham, M.D correlating an association between the bitter taste receptor phenotype and clinical outcomes among patients with COVID-19 has confirmed that a simple at-home taste test could be a gamechanger in predicting duration and symptom severity of the virus.

peaking exclusively to Doctorpedia, Dr. Henry P. Barham explains that the study suggests that T2R38 receptor allelic variants were associated with participants’ innate immune response toward SARS-CoV-2. The T2R phenotype was associated with patients’ clinical course after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Non-tasters were more likely to be hospitalized and experience more severe and long-lasting symptoms with SARS- CoV-2 than the other 2 groups, suggesting enhanced innate immune protection against SARS-CoV-2.

Doctorpedia Founding Medical Partner Dr. Sanjay Juneja, who conducted the exclusive interview with Dr. Barham to learn more about the implications that these scientific findings will have for COVID-19 diagnosis, comments: “The taste receptors in your mouth – especially to bitterness – if you’re what we call a supertaster, […] it can actually affect how well you clear viruses so much so that people that are able to taste bitterness really have a much higher clearance rate to prevent that virus from going into your body.

The data has shown in this study that this test can help predict duration and severity of symptoms. Meaning: yes, if you have a new strain of this Coronavirus or it mutates, or you have some other new novel virus – this should stay true because it’s part of your innate immunity and we’ve actually now studied it to other viruses, not just COVID […] And so I would argue it actually is a good way to help stratify the order in which people could receive vaccination, especially in countries where resources are limited.”

Henry P. Barham, M.D, Doctorpedia contributor

GI Symptoms and Chronic Fatigue May Persist Months After COVID-19 – Medscape

Gastrointestinal symptoms and chronic fatigue may persist months after the COVID-19 virus infection resolves, results of a recent cohort-controlled study suggest.

About 5 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, relative risks of loose stools, somatization, and chronic fatigue were increased by approximately two- to three fold, compared to individuals who had not been infected, according to study results presented at the annual Digestive Disease Week® (DDW).

These longer-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be more severe in patients who had experienced diarrhea during the acute infection, according to investigator Daniele Noviello, MD, a second-year resident in gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Milan.

This is the first cohort-controlled study that specifically investigates gastrointestinal symptoms and somatoform disorders, Noviello said in a virtual presentation of the results.

“Based on our data, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal, and somatoform symptoms may have a common postinfectious origin, and they should be investigated in the follow-up of SARS-CoV-2 patients,” he said.

Joe Biden Believes China Hiding COVID-19 Origin Info, China Warns ‘Political Virus’ Spreading – Newsweek

President Joe Biden and his officials believe China is hiding information regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, a contentious issue that the U.S. administration warns it will pursue in spite of protests from Beijing, which has accused Washington of politicizing the investigation.

“This virus originated in China and China has information that it has not shared with the global community about its origins,” a senior administration official told Newsweek, “and that is information that we all need access to in order to prevent the next pandemic.”

The remarks came two days after Biden issued a statement in which he offered an update on a U.S. Intelligence Community report he commissioned in March on the origins of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

In a rare insight to the ongoing probe, the president said Wednesday that the U.S. Intelligence Community “has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.” Out of the possibilities of an animal-to-human transmission or a laboratory accident, he revealed the latest analysis as determining: “while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”

The comments marked the most dramatic shift yet in the administration’s narrative on the theory that the novel coronavirus escaped from a scientific institution, most usually cited as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an esteemed facility that deals with coronavirus research and is located in the city where the disease was first detected late last year. Most experts had previously dismissed the scenario as far-fetched, and many still do.

In Beijing, Biden’s announcement sparked anger as Chinese officials have downplayed the lab leak hypothesis as unfounded, and accused those promoting it of bearing ill-intentions.

Early analysis suggests that another mRNA vaccine is safe, but its effectiveness isn’t yet known. – New York Times

The German company CureVac said on Friday that its Covid-19 vaccine had passed its first interim analysis, but that it was not yet ready to share data on how well it protects against infection. The shot could be cheaper and more accessible to low-income countries that lack vaccines.

The company said that an independent Data Safety Monitoring Board found no safety concerns. But the board did not share any efficacy data, suggesting that it’s not yet clear just how much protection the vaccine provides.

“The trial will continue to collect sufficient data in order to conduct statistically significant efficacy analysis,” the company said in its statement.

The CureVac vaccine is based on mRNA technology, like the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. Those vaccines are in use in the United States and the European Union and have proved to be highly effective, boosting hopes that CureVac’s might provide similarly strong protection against Covid-19.

CureVac’s vaccine might have some advantages over the other mRNA vaccines. It can be stored in a refrigerator for at least three months at 41 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can sit for 24 hours at room temperature before it is used.

In their initial formulations, the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines had to be kept in a deep freeze. Both companies have been tinkering with their recipes to make their vaccines more stable at warmer temperatures, which may broaden their use in poorer countries where freezing poses a challenge.

CureVac’s doses might also turn out to be cheaper than the others. Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, released a report Wednesday from researchers at Imperial College London, estimating the costs of producing enough RNA vaccines to provide herd immunity in low- and middle-income countries. Researchers found that iIt would cost $23 billion to make 8 billion doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, $9 billion for Moderna and just $4 billion for CureVac.

Covid risk should be low in U.S. this summer but will rise in fall – CNBC

The coronavirus threat in the U.S. is likely to be rather low this summer, but it’s not guaranteed to stay that way later this year, Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Friday.

“I don’t think we should declare mission accomplished. I think that we should declare a near-term victory,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said on “Squawk Box.”

Coronavirus cases in the country have tumbled as more Americans get vaccinated against Covid. The seven-day average of daily new infections is around 23,000, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. That’s down more than 50% since the beginning of May alone.

“I think we’ve done enough to give ourselves an opportunity to enjoy the summer and be at low risk this summer,” said Gottlieb, who led the FDA from 2017 to 2019 and now serves on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer. However, he added, “I do think that this is going to be a risk as we get into the fall and probably more likely the winter.”

The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts

Netherlands will ease coronavirus lockdown measures starting June 5

The U.K. approves the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being ‘poisoned by politics’

Rich MendezFRI, MAY 28TH 2021

The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts

COVID-19 cases spiking again at ICE detention centers

Nearly three-quarters of seniors in the US have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19

CDC drops masking and physical distancing guidance for fully vaccinated campers and staffers

Biden Budget Requests Steep Increases for NIH, CDC, SAMHSA

Senate passes resolution urging probe into COVID-19 origins

Texas Hospital Sued by 117 Employees For Requiring COVID Vaccine to Work

120,000 California Stimulus Checks Haven’t Been Cashed: How to Check Yours

Idaho Gov Calls Lt. Gov ‘Irresponsible,’ Reverses School Mask Mandate Ban

The C.D.C. says unvaccinated children at U.S. camps can go without masks most of the time when they are outside.

A U.S. government agency says employers can provide incentives for vaccines, as long as they aren’t too big.

Idaho’s governor repeals the lieutenant governor’s ban on mask mandates.

Once a moon shot, 70 percent Covid vaccination may be in reach, poll finds.

Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks

A Proposal To End The COVID-19 Pandemic

The Challenges In Dating The End Of Recessions

In California, Nursing Home Owners Can Operate After They’re Denied A License

Facebook’s Top Sources Of Disinformation

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