Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 5.3 % HIGHER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 7.1 % LOWER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 15,570
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 161
- No One Is Sure If The Delta Variant Is Deadlier
- With the more contagious Delta variant, some officials are issuing new mask guidance
- Vaccinated people are dying from the Delta variant, but in small numbers and almost all are over 50, UK data shows
- Reported: 1.5 Million Injuries From Covid Jabs and 15,472 Deaths (European Union’s Database)
- How a COVID-19 infection changes blood cells in the long run
- Study offers more evidence that face masks can prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission
- U.S. Pauses Use of Lilly’s Monoclonal Antibody Combo for COVID
- Effectiveness of Sputnik V vaccine reaches 97.8% in UAE
- The Pew Research Center, which does some of the country’s best polls, classifies all Americans as being in one of nine different political groups
- Plus many more headlines …
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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 and Recovery News You May Have Missed
Vaccinated people are dying from the Delta variant, but in small numbers and almost all are over 50, UK data shows – Business Insider
- The UK has recorded a total of 117 deaths in people with the Delta coronavirus variant.
- Fifty were among people who’d taken two doses of vaccines — a reminder that the shots are imperfect.
- No fully vaccinated people under 50 died, and the overall death rate was 0.13%.
U.S. Pauses Use of Lilly’s Monoclonal Antibody Combo for COVID – MedPage
Bamlanivimab and etesevimab not active against all viral strains.
The U.S. government will pause distribution of the monoclonal antibodies bamlanivimab and etesevimab, authorized for high-risk COVID-19 outpatients, citing poor performance against variants, health officials announced on Friday.
HHS’s office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) said they were halting distribution of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, as well as etesevimab separately, on a national basis. Previously, nine states had already paused distribution. The statement recommended clinicians use a separate monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19 patients.
Bamlanivimab and etesevimab as a combination therapy was previously authorized in February under emergency use authorization (EUA) for COVID-19 patients at high risk of severe disease. FDA revoked the EUA for bamlanivimab as monotherapy for this group of patients in April.
In vitro data on the combination found the therapy was “not active against either the P.1 [Gamma] or B.1.351 [Beta] variants,” which as the statement noted, now comprise 11% of COVID cases in the U.S., and counting.
Manufacturer Eli Lilly responded in an emailed statement to Endpoints News, acknowledging that, “bamlanivimab and etesevimab administered together do not retain neutralization effects against the Gamma or Beta variant.”
The Pew Research Center, which does some of the country’s best polls, classifies all Americans as being in one of nine different political groups. – New York Times
And who are these solid liberals? They are disproportionately college graduates with above-average incomes. They are also heavily white.
By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center
By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center
Effectiveness of Sputnik V vaccine reaches 97.8% in UAE – TASS
Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has demonstrated 97.8% effectiveness against COVID-19, and 100% effectiveness against severe cases of the disease in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) informed.
“The RDIF announces the data of the UAE Ministry of Health on the use of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine during vaccination of the population. According to the data collected among 81,000 persons vaccinated with both doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, the effectiveness of the vaccine has reached 97.8%. The Russian vaccine has demonstrated full (100%) effectiveness against severe cases of the coronavirus,” the message says.
The fund informs that the data was analyzed as of June 8, 2021.
“Official data on vaccination from the UAE also shows that Sputnik V demonstrates high safety figures. In particular, no severe side effects after vaccination were documented, no vaccination-related hospitalizations or deaths were recorded,” the message says.
With the more contagious Delta variant, some officials are issuing new mask guidance – CNN
The more dangerous and more transmissible Delta variant has spread to almost every state in the US, fueling health experts’ concerns about Covid-19 spikes.
The variant is expected to become the dominant coronavirus strain in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. And with half the US still not fully vaccinated, doctors say it could cause a resurgence of Covid-19 in the fall — just as children too young to get vaccinated go back to school.
In Los Angeles County, the pace of Delta’s spread has prompted officials to reinstate mask guidance for public indoor spaces — regardless of vaccination status.
The new, voluntary mask guidance is necessary until health officials can “better understand how and to who the Delta variant is spreading,” the county’s department of public health said.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has shown to be 88% effective against symptomatic infections caused by the Delta variant — two weeks after the second dose. Those who are only partially vaccinated have significantly less protection.And Moderna’s vaccine was found in lab experiments to work against new variants such as the Delta strain, the company said Tuesday. Researchers used serum samples from eight participants taken a week after they received their second dose of vaccine.
But the spread of coronavirus is outpacing vaccinations, the World Health Organization said. And the longer coronavirus spreads among unvaccinated people, the more opportunities it has to mutate into more troubling variants.
Now the Gamma variant has been shown to be more resistant to vaccines and antibody treatments. Last week, the WHO said even those who are fully vaccinated should wear masks in places with high rates of Covid-19 spread.
Many states have not reinstated mask mandates for the upcoming school year, including New Jersey — where masks will not be required “unless the district decides to make it protocol,” Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday.
[editor’s note: Los Angeles County public health officials are done rethinking and encouraged all residents to wear masks indoors in public — even the fully vaccinated.]
Why No One Is Sure If Delta Is Deadlier – The Atlantic
The coronavirus is on a serious self-improvement kick. Since infiltrating the human population, SARS-CoV-2 has splintered into hundreds of lineages, with some seeding new, fast-spreading variants. A more infectious version first overtook the OG coronavirus last spring, before giving way to the ultra-transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7) variant. Now Delta (B.1.617.2), potentially the most contagious contender to date, is poised to usurp the global throne.
Alphabetically, chronologically, the virus is getting better and better at its primary objective: infecting us. And experts suspect that it may be a while yet before the pathogen’s contagious potential truly maxes out. “A virus is always going to try and increase its transmissibility if it can,” Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, told me.
Other aspects of the virus’s unfolding bildungsroman, however, are much harder to forecast, or even get an initial read on. Researchers still don’t have a good handle on which variants might cause more cases of severe disease or death, a metric called virulence. And while a virus’s potential to transmit can sometimes heighten its propensity to kill, the two are by no means inextricably linked: Future coronavirus strains could trend more lethal, or less, or neither. We keep trying to pigeonhole specific variants as “more dangerous,” “more deadly,” or “more problematic,” but viral evolution is a humbling, haphazard mess—a plot-twisting story we have to watch play out in real time. “We cannot be complacent about ‘Oh, this is the end of the mutations,'” Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist and immunologist at Yale, told me.
[editor’s note: great informative post which deserves a full read]
Reported: 1.5 Million Injuries From Covid Jabs and 15,472 Deaths (European Union’s Database) – ecency
Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. This report is from EudraVigilance.
[editor’s note: I have played in the EU’s database and these numbers appear correct. This is significantly worse than what the U.S. database shows]
Study offers more evidence that face masks can prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission – News-Medical
The researchers collected pieces from 45 masks, both woven and non-woven, worn by 45 suspected COVID-19 patients. The latter made up the majority (67%) of the sample. All samples were positive for the virus, but only on the inner surface of the masks.
Not a single mask showed the presence of the virus on the outer surface.
The median cycle threshold (Ct) values were approximately 28 for the swabs and 38 for the mask samples. Thus, the Ct values were 3 logs lower, corresponding to a difference of 1,000 copies/mL, for the mask samples compared to the swabs.
There was no significant difference in the use of cloth or surgical masks, with the median Ct value being 36 and 40, respectively, compared to 25 and 31 for the swab Ct values in the wearers of either type of mask.
The findings of this study contradict the anti-mask messaging that is currently circulating through the Americas, despite the surge in cases in many countries in these continents. Overall, the protective effect of masks in preventing the spread of the virus from an infected individual to another is obvious.
By blocking the passage of infectious viral particles in respiratory aerosols and droplets, mask use benefits the community by preventing viral transmission. This effect is independent of the type of mask used, supporting the use of homemade or commercially used cloth masks.
Analysis: Why we’ll likely never know whether a covid lab leak happened in China – News-Medical
Here’s the problem: Chinese scientists are great scientists, but they work for an authoritarian government where politics, not facts, always come first. If information they know or discover makes China look bad, it is dangerous to say it — especially to foreign colleagues, especially publicly, and, often, even to their friends or family.
That may sound familiar after the presidency of Donald Trump, during which he often mocked and sidelined experts like Fauci. But the risk for scientists in China is far worse: loss of your job and your kids’ career prospects, visits by the police, false accusations, even prison.
As the country’s leader, Xi Jinping reminded his scientists in a speech last year: “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland.”
Every Chinese citizen knows how to interpret that statement, and I learned, too: When I was a reporter in Beijing, I got to know Dr. Gao Yaojie, who exposed an epidemic of HIV/AIDS in rural China that had resulted from unsanitary blood collection practices, some state-run.
… Mistakes happen in science. Pathogens leak out of good containment labs, and not because people are evil. It’s because, for example, the technician performing the bench work forgets an important step or, in a rush to go home, gets sloppy — it takes only a second. Or, for example, if scientists gathering bat samples in remote caves get a bit too comfortable in a dangerous environment — because they’ve been there dozens of times before with no problem and the biohazard suits and masks are suffocating. So, they pull off the face mask a bit too early as they exit.
When that happens, you have to acknowledge the error right away to contain the damage. But Chinese scientists can’t do that, at least publicly. When, in late December 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist working at one of Wuhan’s major hospitals, raised his concerns to colleagues about patients dying from a strange new virus, he was punished and told by police to “stop making false comments” and investigated for “spreading rumours.” He died of covid just a few weeks later.
In China today, it is dangerous to say what you know if it challenges the official government narrative. People who participated in the protests on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square, which were violently put down by the Chinese army, don’t even tell their children about that bloody day when many hundreds, and possibly thousands, were killed.
[editor’s note: another significant article which deserves a full read]
How a COVID-19 infection changes blood cells in the long run – EurekAlert
New research suggests that a coronavirus infection alters the biomechanical properties of red and white blood cells, in some cases for months — a possible explanation for long COVID
Using real-time deformability cytometry, researchers at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin in Erlangen were able to show for the first time: Covid-19 significantly changes the size and stiffness of red and white blood cells – sometimes over months. These results may help to explain why some affected people continue to complain of symptoms long after an infection (long Covid).
Shortness of breath, fatigue and headaches: some patients still struggle with the long-term effects of a severe infection by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus after six months or more. This post Covid-19 syndrome, also called long covid, is still not properly understood. What is clear is that — during the course of the disease — often blood circulation is impaired, dangerous vascular occlusions can occur and oxygen transport in is limited. These are all phenomena in which the blood cells and their physical properties play a key role.
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Fearing COVID, struggling Malawian women forgo prenatal care
Serum Institute seeks ‘Green Pass’ approval for Covishield, applies to European agency
Four major cities in Australia went into lockdown in an attempt to quash new outbreaks of the Delta variant, while Hong Kong halted all passenger flights from the U.K. to prevent the spread.
Russia Announces Plans to Vaccinate Citizens Against COVID Every Year
Russia Reports 652 COVID Deaths, Highest Total in Pandemic
Brisbane Joins Sydney, Perth in Australian Lockdowns After new COVID Cases
Looming Bangladesh lockdown threatens apparel retailers H&M, Levi’s, report says
Israel Sees Explosion Of Cases In Vaccinated Patients Caused By “Delta” Variant
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Preliminary research found that mixing doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines produced high levels of antibodies and immune cells.
Dandelion extract inhibits SARS-CoV-2 in vitro
In a Gallup poll, 29% of Americans said the pandemic was over, while 40% said they don’t expect their lives will ever be normal again.
57% of Republicans Think Pandemic is Over Compared to 4% of Democrats: Poll
A federal judge — appointed by Barack Obama — dismissed the federal and state antitrust suits against Facebook, a victory for the company.
The Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna may provide immunity for years, scientists say.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving school bathrooms, effectively siding with a transgender boy who wanted to use the boys’ room.
Gold Declines as Dollar Gains on Europe’s Covid Variant Concerns
The Illinois Department of Public Health announced that an outbreak of more than 80 COVID-19 cases was linked to a youth summer camp where few were vaccinated and mask wearing was limited.
The high price tag of aducanumab (Aduhelm), the newly approved Alzheimer’s drug, may force Medicare to restrict coverage.
Juul Labs will cough up a $40 million settlement to the state of North Carolina over claims that its marketing practices led to widespread nicotine addiction among teens using e-cigarettes.
Halfway through the WNBA season — with nearly every player vaccinated — there have been zero COVID-19 infections.
Moderna says COVID-19 vaccine performed well in a lab against delta variant
Sanofi to invest $477M annually in mRNA vaccine research
United Airlines makes largest ever order of 270 jetliners
Indiana judge blocks cutoff of expanded unemployment aid
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic and Recovery With Hyperlinks
June 2021 Conference Board Consumer Confidence Improves
S and P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20 City Home Price Index April 2021 Year-over-Year Growth Continues
How Job Separations Differed Between The Great Recession And COVID-19 Recession
Infographic Of The Day: 5 Trends For Investors To Watch Amid A COVID-19 Recovery
Covid Burden Now Heaviest On England’s Youngest
June 2021 Chemical Activity Barometer Index Continues To Improve
Warning to Readers
The amount of politically biased articles on the internet continues. And studies and opinions of the experts continue to contradict other studies and expert opinions. Honestly, it is difficult to believe anything anymore.
I assemble this update daily – sifting through the posts on the internet. I try to avoid politically slanted posts. This daily blog is not an echo chamber for any party line – and will publish controversial topics unless there are clear reasons why the topic is false. And I usually publish conflicting topics. It is my job to provide information so that you have the facts necessary – and then it is up to readers to draw conclusions. It is not my job to sell any point of view.
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.
- Older population countries will have a significantly higher death rate as there is relatively few hospitalizations and deaths in younger age groups..
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 at least 12 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 effectiveness as it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure.
- 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 remains 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.
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