Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 19.5 % HIGHER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 29.5 % HIGHER than the rolling average one week ago.
Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 50,068
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 1,687
- How replication and recombination contribute to emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants
- What are the symptoms of delta variant in kids?
- India’s Ivermectin Blackout
- Major study of Ivermectin, the anti-vaccine crowd’s latest COVID drug, finds ‘no effect whatsoever’
- In new documentary, WHO scientist says Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis
- South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Defends Sturgis Rally, Fires Back at Fauci
- A Bill Has Been Introduced In Congress That Would Ban Tens Of Millions Of Americans From Flying
- Yet Again, The Media’s COVID Narrative Doesn’t Add Up
- New Covid variants ‘would set us back a year’, experts warn UK government
- How the delta variant took over the US
- 3 signs another housing bubble is looming in the US
- Delta’s surging and antibodies are waning: What to know about when we’ll need COVID-19 booster shots
- 5 COVID-19 Delta+ Deaths In Maharashtra, 66 Cases So Far, Many Vaccinated
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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
Econintersect published two summary posts for COVID news over this past week:
How replication and recombination contribute to emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants – News-Medical
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been caused by the rapid outbreak of a novel coronavirus, namely, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Since then, the virus has already claimed more than 4.3 million lives worldwide.
Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 were developed in record time thanks to the rapid sharing of information among researchers. The virus, however, is evolving as it spreads.
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus belonging to the family Coronaviridae. Like all RNA viruses, this virus has an error-prone replication process, generating mutations and resulting in new SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Researchers have stated that increasing selection pressure is prevailing among the circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains. Only those strains that can evade the natural infection and vaccine-induced immunity will influence the selection of viral variants.
A new study, published in the journal Trends in Microbiology, has focused on the contribution of two processes, replication and recombination, to the generation of current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants.
SARS-CoV-2, like any other coronavirus, requires an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) for replication. The RdRp is inherently prone to error and, therefore, it aids in the evolution of viruses via replication-associated changes. The rate of mutation is low because of the proofreading process of the virus-encoded 3 exonuclease. For SARS-CoV-2, proofreading is carried out by nsp14. However, proofreading alone cannot prevent the virus from undergoing genetic changes or mutations, which are extremely important for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.
… Recombination, unlike replication, may bring about more critical modifications in the viral genome. These modifications may lead to significant changes in the phenotype of SARS-CoV-2. In addition, discontinuous transcription of coronavirus genomes permits recombination in a cell infected with multiple coronavirus species, leading to the formation of subgenomic RNA and proteins, which have implications for the fate of infected cells.
[editor’s note: interesting article which deserves a full read. It seems if this process is correctly described, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated are adding to the creation of variants (as the vaccinated also have the replication and recombination process). Also read Vaccine Expert Vanden Bossche Calls For “Immediate Halt” To Vaccinations, Says They Encourage “Escape Mutant” Variants]
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Defends Sturgis Rally, Fires Back at Fauci – Newsweek
Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem on Friday defended the state’s massive Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and pushed back against criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials who feared the event could lead to a surge in COVID-19 infections.
Speaking on Fox News‘ The Ingraham Angle, Noem accused Fauci of harboring political bias against the rally, which attracts roughly 700,000 people for a two-week event to South Dakota’s Black Hills each year.
“What Dr. Fauci is doing by constantly targeting the Sturgis bike rally, by constantly focusing on South Dakota and ignoring liberals who gather every single day – their hypocrisy is just wrong,” she said Friday.
“I think it’s unfortunate he’s building a distrust into his profession. We need our public health officials, we need to be able to trust them and he’s just gotten political and picked winners and losers based on who he likes and who he doesn’t,” Noem added.
Noem’s comments came after Fauci recently said that he’s “very concerned” the event could lead to a rise in coronavirus infections, particularly as the highly infectious Delta variant soars across the country.
India’s Ivermectin Blackout – ZeroHedge
News of India’s defeat of the Delta variant should be common knowledge. It is just about as obvious as the nose on one’s face. It is so clear when one looks at the graphs that no one can deny it.
Yet, for some reason, we are not allowed to talk about it. Thus, for example, Wikipedia cannot mention the peer-reviewed meta-analyses by Dr. Tess Lawrie or Dr. Pierre Kory published in the American Journal of Therapeutics.
Wikipedia is not allowed to publish the recent meta-analysis on Ivermectin authored by Dr. Andrew Hill.
Furthermore, it is not allowed to say anything concerning www.ivmmeta.com showing the 61 studies comprising 23,000 patients which reveal up to a 96% reduction in death [prophylaxis] with Ivermectin.
One can see the bias in Wikipedia by going on the “talk” pages for each subject and reading about the fierce attempts of editors to add these facts and the stone wall refusals by the “senior” editors who have an agenda. And that agenda is not loyalty to your health.
The easy way to read the “talk” page on any Wikipedia subject is to click the top left “talk” button. Anyone can then review the editors’ discussions.
There is a blackout on any conversation about how Ivermectin beat COVID-19 in India. When I discussed the dire straits that India found itself in early this year with 414,000 cases per day, and over 4,000 deaths per day, and how that evaporated within five weeks of the addition of Ivermectin, I am often asked, “But why is there no mention of that in the news?”
Yes, exactly. Ask yourself why India’s success against the Delta variant with Ivermectin is such a closely guarded secret by the NIH and CDC. Second, ask yourself why no major media outlets reported this fact, but instead, tried to confuse you with false information by saying the deaths in India are 10 times greater than official reports.
Major study of Ivermectin, the anti-vaccine crowd’s latest COVID drug, finds ‘no effect whatsoever’ – Los Angeles Times
Ivermectin, the latest supposed treatment for COVID-19 being touted by anti-vaccination groups, had “no effect whatsoever” on the disease, according to a large patient study.
That’s the conclusion of the Together Trial, which has subjected several purported nonvaccine treatments for COVID-19 to carefully designed clinical testing. The trial is supervised by McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and conducted in Brazil.
One of the trial’s principal investigators, Edward Mills of McMaster, presented the results from the Ivermectin arms of the study at an Aug. 6 symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
Among the 1,500 patients in the study, he said, Ivermectin showed “no effect whatsoever” on the trial’s outcome goals – whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization.
“In our specific trial,” he said, “we do not see the treatment benefit that a lot of the advocates believe should have been” seen.
The study’s results on Ivermectin haven’t been formally published or peer-reviewed. Earlier peer-reviewed results from the Together Trial related to the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which had been touted as a miracle treatment for COVID by then-President Trump, were published in April; they showed no significant therapeutic effect on the virus.
5 COVID-19 Delta+ Deaths In Maharashtra, 66 Cases So Far, Many Vaccinated – NDTV
The COVID-19 Delta Plus variant, considered highly infectious, was detected during genome sequencing of swab samples sent from different parts of the state.
Five people, including one from Mumbai, have died and as many as 66 people have been found infected with the Delta Plus variant of COVID-19 in Maharashtra so far. Some of them are fully vaccinated, the state health department said on Friday.
Seven of these patients were aged under 18, they added.
The COVID-19 Delta Plus variant, considered highly infectious, was detected during genome sequencing of swab samples sent from different parts of the state.
A 63-year-old fully vaccinated woman from Mumbai died because of the infection in the last week of July, the first death due to the Delta Plus variant in Mumbai, a civic official said.
What are the symptoms of delta variant in kids? – Quartz
More kids are coming down with Covid-19 thanks to the highly contagious delta variant-leading to an understandable spike in anxiety among parents.
The good news is that kids are unlikely to get severely ill from Covid. A recent report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association showed that less than 2% of kids confirmed to have Covid have required hospitalization, of the 23 states where data was available along with New York City. The bad news is that, as more kids come down with Covid, the proportionate number who get hospitalized is going up as well.
… When symptoms do manifest, Maldonado says kids “tend not to have the same difficult respiratory symptoms that adults do.” Instead, she says symptoms to look out for include:
- Fever
- Sore throat
- Nausea
- Diarrhea
“But,” she notes, “they can have the same symptoms as adults as well.” Other possible symptoms that also manifest in adults, according to the CDC, are:
- Cough
- Difficulty breathing
- Fatigue
- Headaches or body aches
- Loss of taste or smell
- Congestion or runny nose
3 signs another housing bubble is looming in the US – Business Insider
Experts dismissed housing-bubble concerns earlier this year, but they’re not anymore.
Key data points are on track to reach bubble levels soon, though most sit below their 2006 peaks.
Here are three signs the US is hurtling toward another housing bubble – if it’s not there already.
1. Prices are above bubble levels
2. Homes are selling with bubblelike intensity
3. Rents are also spiking higher
How the delta variant took over the US – The Hill
The delta variant has overtaken the U.S. in a matter of weeks as it spreads around the world in what President Biden‘s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci called a “global outbreak” of the strain.
The highly contagious variant of COVID-19 is considered at least two times more contagious than the previously dominant alpha strain, and experts say the increased transmissibility has likely fueled the surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths nationwide.
But much is still unknown about delta as scientists scramble to better understand the strain.
Here’s what we know about the delta strain and how it blunted earlier momentum in the fight against the coronavirus.
- Delta is more transmissible than previous COVID-19 strains
- It has a higher magnitude of viral loads
- Vaccines are still effective against delta. Studies have found that at least five vaccines, including all three used in the U.S., are effective against the delta variant in lab and real-world settings, Fauci said on Thursday. It was previously unclear whether the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one dose instead of two, was equally effective. But a study released last week found the immune response lasted at least eight months, resulting in the first real-world data for the vaccine, Fauci said.
Yet Again, The Media’s COVID Narrative Doesn’t Add Up – ZeroHedge
If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.
It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during March, April, and May of 2020. Local governments were building makeshift hospitals in convention centers-yet they went unused. Memphis’s overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals “were never overwhelmed.” Colorado built a twenty-two hundred-patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used.
Now we’re being told that this time, they really mean it and hospitals are on the verge of overflowing.
Yet according to data from Johns Hopkins, most of these cases may be overstated. In Texas, for example, whose hospitals have been the subject of countless recent stories about overflowing ICUs, the state is a long way from reaching its earlier peaks of 2020. Moreover, Texas is now staffing fewer ICU beds overall. The story is the same in Georgia, that supposed home of an “experiment in human sacrifice,” where officials were among the first to end stay-at-home orders in 2020. Indeed, it’s clear most of the country-regardless of the state’s use of mask mandates or stay-at-home orders-remains well behind previous peak levels.
One outlier in terms of hospitalizations, however, is the state of Florida. Numbers in Florida do appear to be closer to previous peaks than in most other states, and ICU usage is now larger than what it was during the summer of 2020.
… The implication, of course, is that DeSantis’s opposition to these measures has somehow caused today’s rising number of hospitalizations.
This connection is so tenuous, however, that even Philip Bump at the Washington Post-who clearly is no fan of DeSantis-admits it’s unclear what’s behind Florida’s rising numbers. Florida may be an outlier in terms of new hospitalizations, but it’s not an outlier in terms of policy. States that have been relatively laissez-faire on covid, like Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, and Nebraska have not seen trends similar to Florida’s.
Moreover, Bump notes that Florida has higher vaccination rates than many states with both fewer hospitalizations and fewer new covid deaths. Florida isn’t an outlier in terms of vaccinations. Nearly 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated in Florida-California is at 53 percent. Floridians are vaccinated at higher rates than is the case in Utah, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota. Yet these other states all have fewer cases of new deaths and hospitalizations, per capita:
Something makes Florida exceptional here: These numbers are hazy enough (thanks to reporting periods and the lags in case and death counts) that one can certainly cobble together a case that there’s some other factor at play than indifference from state leadership. And, in fact, something else may be the problem. It’s hard to say.
In new documentary, WHO scientist says Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis – Washington Post
The World Health Organization expert who led a controversial joint probe into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic says in a documentary airing Thursday night on Danish television that Chinese colleagues influenced the presentation of their findings.
Speaking to Danish documentarians, Peter Ben Embarek said Chinese researchers on the team had pushed back against linking the origins of the pandemic to a research laboratory in Wuhan in a report about the investigation.
“In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek said during the interview. “We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”
In its report released earlier this year, the WHO-China team said it was “very unlikely” that the virus, officially named SARS-CoV-2, could have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another facility in the Chinese city where infections were first found. The joint team of researchers said it would not recommend further investigation into the issue.
A discussion of whether to include the lab-leak theory at all lasted until 48 hours before the conclusion of the mission, Ben Embarek told the Danish reporters. In the end, Ben Embarek’s Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
Asked in the documentary whether the report’s “extremely unlikely” wording about the lab-leak theory was a Chinese requirement, Ben Embarek said “it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.” But he added that this meant it was not impossible, just not likely.
Delta’s surging and antibodies are waning: What to know about when we’ll need COVID-19 booster shots – Business Insider
The debate over whether the US should roll out extra doses of coronavirus vaccines is reaching a fever pitch.
Pfizer and Moderna, the pharmaceutical companies selling two of the widely used US vaccines, have forcefully argued that booster doses will be necessary before the winter. Some vaccine experts have been just as forceful in saying they aren’t needed yet.
“No vaccine, at least not within this category, is going to have an indefinite amount of protection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said in an interview with NBC News on Thursday.
“What we’re doing literally on a weekly and monthly basis is following cohorts of patients to determine if, when, and who should get it,” he said later. “But right now, at this moment, other than the immunocompromised, we’re not going to be giving boosters to people.”
Whether it’s the opinions of independent experts, recommendations from drug companies, or the latest research fueling the debate, there are compelling arguments for and against rolling out booster doses to the broad US population.
It isn’t obvious there’s a clear answer at this point, which makes for a good argument as well as a tricky public-health situation. The rise of the Delta variant, which partially lowers protection from vaccines, is adding to the urgency of the situation.
COVID-19 Hospitalizations Among Ages 30-39 Reaches New Record: U.S. Data – Daily Beast
COVID-19 hospitalizations among those in their 30s have reached a new record, U.S. data shows, with doctors attributing the rise to the Delta variant’s grip over the unvaccinated.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the rate among those between the ages 30 and 39 entering the hospital is 2.5 among 100,000 people as of Wednesday, up from a January record of 2 per 100,000. Doctors pointed to the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant, which has hit an age group once thought largely impervious to hospitalization. That risk is also amplified by increased socialization, providing more avenues for those unvaccinated in their 30s to catch the virus. “It loves social mobility,” Dr. James Fiorica, chief medical officer of a hospital in Sarasota, Florida, told The Wall Street Journal. “An unvaccinated 30-year-old can be a perfect carrier.”
It’s led some doctors in Arkansas to monitor younger patients for possible organ failure. “This age group pretty much went unscathed,” Nikhil Meena, the medical director of the University of Arkansas Medical Center’s ICU, said. “They’re all out there doing their thing and getting infected and getting sick enough to be in this hospital.”
A Bill Has Been Introduced In Congress That Would Ban Tens Of Millions Of Americans From Flying – ZeroHedge
Before this pandemic, it would have been unimaginable for Congress to consider a bill that would ban tens of millions of Americans from flying. But now everything has changed. A new bill has been introduced that would specifically ban all unvaccinated individuals from ever flying again. When I first heard about this, I thought that it couldn’t possibly be true. But it is true. The following comes from the description of H.R. 4980 that has been posted on Congress.gov …
To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that any individual traveling on a flight that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States or a territory of the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and for other purposes.
But what we do know is that it would ban you from any flight “that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States” if you have not been “fully vaccinated”.
So if you have only had one injection, you would be banned too.
This comes at a time when many in the liberal media are also calling for unvaccinated people to be banned from flights. For example, the following excerpt comes from an article entitled “Unvaccinated People Belong on the No-Fly List” …
But at this stage of the pandemic, tougher universal restrictions are not the solution to continuing viral spread. While flying, vaccinated people should no longer carry the burden for unvaccinated people. The White House has rejected a nationwide vaccine mandate-a sweeping suggestion that the Biden administration could not easily enact if it wanted to-but a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take. It will help limit the risk of transmission at destinations where unvaccinated people travel-and, by setting norms that restrict certain privileges to vaccinated people, will also help raise the stagnant vaccination rates that are keeping both the economy and society from fully recovering.
New Covid variants ‘would set us back a year’, experts warn UK government – The Guardian
Ministers are being pressed to reveal what contingency plans are in place to deal with a future Covid variant that evades current vaccines, amid warnings from scientific advisers that such an outcome could set the battle against the pandemic back a year or more.
Recent papers produced by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have suggested that the arrival of a variant that evades vaccines is a “realistic possibility”. Sage backed continued work on new vaccines that reduce infection and transmission more than current jabs, the creation of more vaccine-production facilities in the UK and lab-based studies to predict evolution of variants.
With the arrival of a new variant seen as one of the main dangers that could intensify the crisis once again, prominent scientific figures stressed the risks. Prof Graham Medley, a member of Sage and a leader of the government’s Covid modelling group, said it was “clearly something that the planners and scientists should take very seriously as it would put us back a long way”.
“It is not that different to the planning that needs to be done between pandemics – a new variant that was able to overcome immunity significantly would be essentially a new virus,” he said.
“The advantage would be that we know we can generate vaccines against this virus – and relatively quickly. The disadvantage is that we would be back to the same situation we were in a year ago, depending on how much impact current immunity had against a new variant. Hopefully, evolution is slow, so that new variants arise that are only marginally evasive rather than one big jump.” Dr Marc Baguelin, from Imperial College’s Covid-19 response team and a member of the government’s SPI-M modelling group, said preventing the importation of variants of concern with “moderate to high immune-escape properties would be critical, as these could lead to future waves orders of magnitude larger than the ones experienced so far”.
“It is unlikely that such a new virus evades entirely all immunity from past infection or vaccines,” he said. “Some immunity should remain at least for the most severe outcomes such as death or hospitalisation. We would most likely be able to update the current vaccines to include the emerging strain.
Is it safe to travel? Some may be better off canceling plans during COVID-19 surge, experts say – USA Today
The United States is on its fourth COVID-19 surge thanks to the highly contagious delta variant, with cases bouncing back to levels not seen since February 2020. Other countries are also reporting more COVID-19 cases.
That leaves travelers, many of whom booked trips months ago when case counts were low, wondering whether or not to follow through with their plans.
“The delta variant is a different beast,” Richard Webby, who helps lead St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s Infectious Diseases Department, told USA TODAY. “This virus is everywhere. … As far as (whether or not it’s safe to) travel, it depends on what you’re trying to do.”
Health experts say travel risks vary from person to person, but it may be time for certain travelers – especially those who are unvaccinated or susceptible to severe illness from the virus – to postpone their trips.
“If you’re vaccinated and fully immunized against this virus, then it poses a slight increased risk to you,” Webby said. But among the unvaccinated population, “this virus is going to cause more cases; it’s going to spread more easily and more rapidly. … If you’re not vaccinated, now is not a good time to travel.”
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Afghan President Ghani Flees Country As Taliban Enter Kabul Seeking “Peaceful Transfer Of Power”
A magnitude-7.2 quake flattened buildings and trapped people under rubble in at least two cities in the western part of Haiti. It struck about 80 miles west of Port-au-Prince.
Haiti Earthquake Occurred Along Same Fault Line as the One in 2010.
Biden Sending 5,000 Troops to Afghanistan to Help Drawdown of US Personnel
Children are particularly likely to die from Covid in Indonesia. One big reason is poverty.
Australian state goes into lockdown as Sydney’s outbreak spreads.
Israel: Serious COVID cases pass 500 for 1st time since March as outbreak surges
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Children hospitalized with COVID-19 in U.S. hits record number.
Get the vaccine or get fired? In Shenandoah Valley, some nurses choose termination.
Brawls Break Out at Los Angeles Protest Against COVID Vaccination ‘Tyranny’
Border Patrol seizes thousands of falsified COVID-19 vaccine cards
Florida breaks record for new cases of COVID-19
Florida Nursing Homes Limit Visitors as Covid-19 Cases Flare
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic and Recovery With Hyperlinks
Child Care And School Disruptions Continue To Burden Working Parents
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 15August 2021
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 15August 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.
L452R mutations may have triggered the emergence of several COVID-19 variants
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