Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 66.1 % HIGHER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 20.9 % HIGHER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 12,595
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 83
- Commotion: mRNA Vaccines and Micro Blood Clots
- Chance That COVID-19 Vaccines Are Gene Therapy? ‘Zero’
- Former surgeon general says CDC guidance on masks ‘premature’ and ‘wrong’
- Is COVID China’s Chernobyl?
- CRISPR halts coronavirus transmission in human cells
- More than 1,000 Israelis test positive for COVID
- Israel Toughens COVID Restrictions as Delta Infections Rise
- Covid-19 vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease, experts say, as rising cases threaten unvaccinated
- EU celebrates coronavirus vaccine rate exceeding US programme
- Passport backlog threatens to upend travel plans for millions of Americans
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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
One Reason Why We Have Vaccine Hesitancy Today
The election process cast seeds of doubt on the safety of vaccines. Looking at quotes and videos from the election period:
What Reuters reported on 16 September 2020:
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s charge that he is spreading fear about the safety of a potential coronavirus vaccine, urging Trump to defer to scientists and not rush its rollout.
“Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Biden said. “At this moment, the American people can’t either.”
Biden warned against trying to rush out an unfinished vaccine ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Trump, who has accused Biden and his campaign of stoking doubt among Americans about the efficacy of a vaccine, told reporters at the White House later that Biden should stop promoting “anti-vaccine theories.”
“They’re recklessly endangering lives. You can’t do that,” said Trump, who predicted at least 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine could be distributed by the end of 2020.
[editor’s note: also read https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/biden-trump-coronavirus-vaccine.html]
In short, the COVID vaccines were politicized last year – and you cannot put this genie back in the bottle. We have no way to know how much this affected the vaccine hesitancy that is evidenced today – but it did not help assure people the vaccines would be safe. You reap what you sow.
Econintersect published two summary posts for COVID news over this past week:
Chance That COVID-19 Vaccines Are Gene Therapy? ‘Zero’ – Medscape
The vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna use tiny oily envelopes called lipid nanoparticles to slip a single strand of genetic material called messenger RNA (mRNA) into our cells.
The Johnson and Johnson vaccine is slightly different. It uses double-stranded DNA inserted into a common, but inert virus called an adenovirus. This DNA also contains the instructions for building the spike protein. Once inside the cell, these instructions are read and translated into mRNA.
These bits of mRNA go into the jellied liquid called cytoplasm that makes up the body of our cells.
“Where they join about 200,000 other pieces of messenger RNA that are also sitting in every cell’s cytoplasm, because our cells make proteins and enzymes all the time,” saidsaid Paul Offit, MD, director of the vaccine education center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The mRNA chains are basically work orders that spell out the instructions for making the spike proteins that stud the outside of the coronavirus that cases COVID-19. The virus uses its spikes to dock onto our cells and infect them.
It’s one of the viruses’ most recognizable features. Our cells read this mRNA and use them to assemble the spikes. The spikes migrate to the outside of our cells where they are recognized and remembered by our immune system.
These spikes, by themselves, are not dangerous. They can’t make anyone sick. They are essentially mug shots that help the body recognize and fight off the real perpetrator when it comes along.
The mRNA chains from the vaccines only last for a couple of days before they break down and the pieces are swept away by the body’s normal waste disposal system.
I think people hear that and they think ‘Oh my God, You’re going to alter my DNA. That’s not possible.
… “I think people hear that and they think ‘Oh my God, You’re going to alter my DNA,” Offit said. “That’s not possible.”
Offit explains that in order for the vaccines to alter a person’s genes, the mRNA instructions would have to enter the cell’s control center, the nucleus. The nucleus is walled off from the rest of the cell by its own membrane. To get past that membrane, the mRNA would have to have an enzyme called a nuclear access signal, Offit said, “which it doesn’t have.”
Even if it could get into the nucleus, the single strand of mRNA would have to be translated back into a double stranded DNA.
[editor’s note: article worth a full read]
Commotion: mRNA Vaccines and Micro Blood Clots – Misbar
Charles Hoffe, a doctor in British Columbia, made a series of claims about COVID-19 vaccines. One of his claims was that mRNA vaccines can cause tiny, almost undetectable blood clots. It was widely discussed and shared on social media.
According to Hoffe, over 60% of people inoculated with one such vaccine will die over the course of a few years.
There’s not much evidence to support Hoffe’s claim. Whatever experiments he claims to have performed have not been found credible. Moreover, Hoffe has done suspiciously little research using only one test.
Dr. Hoffe said that he could only find microscopic blood clots using a d-dimer. D-dimer tests detect broken-down blood clots via a blood sample.
Hoffe isn’t the first to look at vaccines using a d-dimer. An actual study conducted by a group of researchers (Hoffe just did it by himself) used d-dimers along with other methods to discover the rate of people who developed a blood clot after becoming vaccinated.
Former surgeon general says CDC guidance on masks ‘premature’ and ‘wrong’ – The Hill
Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidance lifting mask recommendations for fully vaccinated Americans was “premature” and “wrong.”
Adams, who served in the role under former President Trump, said in a lengthy Twitter thread that he feared the CDC made its decision prematurely amid the rise of the delta variant.
“Last year [Anthony] Fauci and I famously, prematurely, & wrongly advised against masks. I felt it was the best call at the time, but now regret it. I’m worried the CDC also made a similarly premature, misinterpreted, yet still harmful call on masking in the face of delta variant,” Adams said.
The comment from Adams comes amid surges of coronavirus infections in the U.S. driven by the spread of the delta strain. These outbreaks have been centered around areas with lower vaccination rates.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the rise was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” noting that almost all of hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people.
But Los Angeles County and Las Vegas have both mandated residents wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status.
Adams compared the current situation to how federal guidance on masks changed last year.
The former surgeon general said that earlier guidance against masks was “based on the science & conditions at the time.” Even though the science changed, people held on to the belief that masks didn’t work, he stated.
Israel Toughens COVID Restrictions as Delta Infections Rise – Haaretz
Israel sees a slight increase in serious COVID-19 cases over the weekend, with 63 people hospitalized, 17 of whom on ventilators
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett issued on Sunday new restrictions in a bid to curb the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant as Israel sees a slight increase in serious cases over the weekend.
The new regulations were issued after the Public Security Ministry had presented Bennett with a new enforcement plan, while coronavirus cases in Israel continue to climb.
According to the new restrictions, indictments will be filed against confirmed coronavirus patients who have violated quarantine.
In addition, police will now focus on enforcing COVID restrictions at events and celebrations, and particularly at weddings, as these gatherings have high potential for mass infections.
Bennett has also ordered Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to regulate the legal aspect of employing technological enforcement measures. The prime minister also seeks to make enforcement procedures more efficient, with an emphasis on issuing penalties.
More than 1,000 Israelis test positive for COVID – The Jerusalem Post
The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the Delta variant is “weaker” than health officials had hoped, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Friday, as over 1,000 people tested positive for coronavirus and more countries were added to the list of places to which Israelis will be banned from traveling.
“We do not know exactly to what degree the vaccine helps, but it is significantly less,” Bennett said.
The prime minister held a meeting of top health officials and ministers to discuss the next steps for managing the virus in light of the numbers in Israel and what Bennett described as “the Delta mutation leaping forward around the world, including in vaccinated countries such as Britain, Israel and the US.”
He said that in “Britain, in recent days, we have seen a jump in the number of children who are being hospitalized on a daily basis. This is a development that we are aware of; we are dealing with it rationally and responsibly.”
With more than 5.7 million Israelis having received at least one shot of the Pfizer vaccine, the country continues to push for citizens – especially teenagers – to go out and get the jab.
[editor’s note: Israel remains the most vaccinated country – and covering what is going on there foreshadows the future in the U.S.]
With Covid-19 cases rising and the Delta variant gaining increased prevalence in the United States, health experts are reiterating that vaccines are effective in the ways that matter most: preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death.
Speaking to CNN’s Jim Acosta on Saturday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the vaccines are shown to be “highly effective in preventing symptomatic, clinically apparent disease.”
“When you start seeing what’s called breakthrough infections, if you look carefully at them, the overwhelming majority of those are people who either have no symptoms or only very mild symptoms,” Fauci said. “So the vaccines are still very, very effective in preventing severe disease.”The Delta variant has “pretty much taken over” in the US, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and a member of the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee. But it’s clear the vaccines work against the Delta variant, too, he said.
EU celebrates coronavirus vaccine rate exceeding US programme – South China Morning Post
- France’s Europe minister Clement Beaune said the EU had now given 55.5 per cent of people a first dose, compared with 55.4 per cent in the US
- Brussels’ strategy for rolling out Covid-19 vaccines was widely criticised earlier this year, lagging behind Britain and the US for lack of supply
Is COVID China’s Chernobyl? – National Review
Thirty-five years ago, the nuclear disaster known to the world as Chernobyl brought discredit at home and abroad to an inept and corrupt Soviet communist regime and signaled the end of the Soviet Union. In February 2020, I wrote a piece wondering whether the coronavirus outbreak, as we called it then, might spell a similar doom for China’s communist regime. Although no one saw fit to publish the essay then, the eerie parallels between the two disasters continue to be provocative.
… When the Chernobyl disaster struck, the Soviet regime was already on its last legs. By contrast, China’s bid for global hegemony is just starting to crest. It is an essential part of the Chinese Communist Party’s identity, regardless of what happens to Xi. China’s leadership has been engaged in a long march to global power since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Mao’s successors, starting with Deng Xiaoping, have committed themselves wholeheartedly to that epic journey.
Despite the friendly face he showed to the West, it was Deng who first described relations with the U.S. as a “cold war” and who made it clear to his colleagues, if not to the outside world, that the goal of his market reforms of the Chinese economy was to “enrich the state and strengthen the military.” What Westerners assumed were reforms to integrate China into the global economic system were actually steps aimed at dominating and controlling that system in order to achieve hegemony.
In the 1990s, Deng’s chosen successor as general secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, launched China on a course of massive military buildup; in the first decades of this century, Hu Jintao engineered China’s high-tech total surveillance state, including the Great Firewall, and launched a Chinese cyber-offensive that stole hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property from an unsuspecting world — the biggest transfer of wealth in history.
… Indeed, China’s surge into recombinant DNA research, as outlined in Xi’s 14th Five-Year Development Plan, could signal Beijing’s interest in scouting out an even more virulent agent as a potential bioweapon.
It’s to be hoped, though, that the world did draw lessons from Chernobyl, which revealed the moral bankruptcy of the regime that allowed it to happen and then tried to cover it up. COVID, in turn, has taught us a sobering lesson about the risks we all run in collaborating with or appeasing Beijing.
Three million dead, tens of trillions of dollars lost worldwide: It’s a terrible price to pay for ignoring the present and future threat posed by a power-obsessed regime.
[editor’s note: this post is worth a full read]
CRISPR halts coronavirus transmission in human cells – freethink
Using CRISPR, Australian researchers have prevented a coronavirus infection from spreading in human cells in the lab. They’re now looking for a way to develop the treatment into an oral drug that could halt coronavirus transmission in people — and potentially stop other viruses as well.
The challenge: While we do have effective COVID-19 vaccines, we’re still in need of better treatments. Right now, our best options are monoclonal antibodies, but those must be delivered intravenously, limiting their use to hospitals, and they are already becoming less effective against new variants.
This lack of treatments is a problem because, while restrictions have been eased or outright lifted in much of the United States, the pandemic is far from over — cases and deaths are on an upward trend in many parts of the nation.
The need: An oral medication that could be taken as soon as someone was diagnosed with COVID-19 could mark a turning point in the pandemic, and the Australian researchers think their CRISPR treatment could lead to the development of such a drug.
“This approach — test and treat — would only be feasible if we have a cheap, oral, and non-toxic antiviral,” lead author Sharon Lewin told Agence France-Presse (AFP).”That’s what we hope to achieve one day with this gene scissors approach.”
Blocking coronavirus transmission: CRISPR is a gene editing tool that originally evolved in bacteria as an antivirus system, for searching out viral genes and destroying them.
In a newly published study, Australian scientists demonstrate how they programmed a CRISPR system to bind to and degrade specific parts of the coronavirus’ genome, blocking transmission between human cells.
Passport backlog threatens to upend travel plans for millions of Americans – The Hill
Millions of Americans hoping to renew their passports and travel abroad this summer could see their plans dashed by a massive backlog caused by staffing shortages at the State Department.
The delays are compounding frustrations for would-be travelers looking to take vacations or visit loved ones who are barred from entering the U.S. because of ongoing restrictions tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
Congressional staff say their offices are being inundated with complaints and pleas from constituents over the wait time for passports. The State Department said in a briefing Wednesday that processing could take up to 18 weeks.
Lawmakers are now getting involved.
The top members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday calling for the State Department to “prioritize efforts to reduce processing time for passport applications.”
“As more and more employees are able to safely return to work, and with demand for passports surging, it is critical that the Department use all available tools to reduce extended processing times, including strategies developed to address past passport backlogs,” wrote Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman and ranking member of the committee.
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Thailand expands lockdown as COVID cases continue to rise
Covid scare at Olympics: 3 test positive
FCC Commissioner: US Government Can Use High-Altitude Balloons to Provide Internet to Cubans
Keep wearing masks to slow spread of Covid, scientists warn Britons
France: Thousands protest against vaccination, COVID passes
Median age of those infected with coronavirus in Italy falls to 28
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Infections rose in every state last week, but counties with low vaccination rates were far more likely to have bigger jumps. Among the 25 counties with the sharpest increases in cases, all but one had vaccinated fewer than 40 percent of their residents, and 16 had vaccinated fewer than 30 percent, a Times analysis found. The new divide in America is particularly stark in Mountain Home, Ark., where fewer than a third of the residents are vaccinated.
Border officials encountered a total of 188,829 migrants at the southern border in June, the largest monthly number in recent history, according to new federal data. And a federal judge ruled DACA unlawful, jeopardizing the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most of whom came to the U.S. as children.
Fauci: Smallpox Eradication Unlikely With Today’s Vaccine Misinformation
Earth’s richest man to blast off into space
Three Texas Democrats who fled state to DC test positive for COVID-19
Mask Mandate for Children Is Not Backed by Science: New Jersey Senators
Legal Group Launches Effort to Learn About Biden Administration’s Coordination With Big Tech
Florida virus hospitalizations again rising after a decline
Hawaii coronavirus hospitalizations jump to 70; Highest since January
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic and Recovery With Hyperlinks
What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Mitigating Climate Change
How COVID-19 Containment Measures Affected Unemployment
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 18July 2021
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 18July 2021
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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