To do their job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats – It’s Time To Purge The “Experts”.
Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 16.6 % HIGHER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 53.7 % HIGHER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:
- U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 87,011
- U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 469
- Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Simple steps for coexisting with the coronavirus
- Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
- Pandemic upends norms around peer-reviewed studies
- Vaccine resistance in the military remains strong, a dilemma for Pentagon as mandate looms
- As some U.S. hospitals reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant, nursing is in crisis.
- Finding reliable masks online can be tricky. Here are tips that can help
- High Inflation Could Be Stickier Than Anticipated
- 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
Econintersect published today two summary articles of pandemic news this past week:
Finding reliable masks online can be tricky. Here are tips that can help. – Washington Post
… If you’re planning to do your mask shopping online, here are a few best practices you should keep in mind.
- Keep an eye out for fakes
- For many people, their search for masks begins and ends on Amazon. While you can certainly find reliable options there, it’s always worth looking at other reputable retailers.
- No matter where your mask search begins, remember to take a few minutes to look through the reviews attached to each mask’s sales listing — especially the negative ones.
- if you frequently spend a lot of time around people whose vaccination status can’t easily be determined, it might be worth joining one of a number of growing communities devoted to sharing their experiences with the masks they’ve used.
- …the most practical thing to do is focus on finding masks like N95s, KN95s, and KF94s that offer high levels of air filtration that actually fit well on your mouth and nose.
As some U.S. hospitals reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant, nursing is in crisis. – New York Times
Bedside nurses are depleted and traumatized, their ranks thinned by early retirements or career shifts. The shortages are complicating efforts to treat coronavirus patients, who often require exacting, round-the-clock attention, leading to longer emergency room waiting times and rushed or inadequate care.
“We’re exhausted, both physically and emotionally,” an emergency room nurse in Mississippi said, choking back tears. One in five I.C.U.s have at least 95 percent of their beds full, according to an analysis by The Times.
High Inflation Could Be Stickier Than Anticipated – Epoch Times
… Inflation has turned into a major source of disagreement among economists, as they are divided over the key question of how long high inflation could stick around.
The Federal Reserve’s latest forecast shows that the inflation will be 3.4 percent this year, before settling back down to just over 2 percent in 2022 and 2023.
“The risk is that higher inflation may have a longer-than-expected ‘tail’ before normalizing, or perhaps a more enduring structural component,” Nanette Abuhoff Jacobson, global investment strategist at Hartford Funds, said in a report.
One area to watch closely, she said, is rents and shelter, the largest component in the consumer price index.
Rents dropped significantly during the pandemic across the country, but now they’re surging at a rapid pace, as more workers return to metro areas, boosting demand for rental apartments. A sustained increase in rents could lead to more persistent inflation, as price increases are hard to reverse.
“We’re going to head into a very high rent period in the next 10 years,” Ken McElroy, CEO of MC Companies, a real estate investment firm, said in an interview.
… Soaring home prices are also pushing people to the rental market. Home prices nationwide rose by 16.6 percent in May, setting a record, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index.
If rents track home prices as in the past, then this could be “a big deal” for inflation, according to Jacobson, as shelter costs have historically lagged home prices by around 18 months.
In addition, surging gas prices have had a significant effect on inflation. In the past year, gasoline prices have risen 41.8 percent, becoming a concern for the Biden administration. The White House on Aug. 11 issued a statement urging the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia (OPEC+) to address rising gasoline costs by boosting oil production. Analysts believe strong demand and slow growth in supplies will likely push energy prices higher in the coming months.
Excessive government stimulus and ever-growing national debt are also fueling inflation fears. The International Monetary Fund warned in July that more fiscal spending could increase inflationary pressures in the United States, pushing the Federal Reserve to take preemptive action.
“I’m surprised that people in Washington don’t get this,” conservative economist Stephen Moore said in an interview, criticizing fiscal spending and the Fed’s ultra-accommodative monetary policy.
Delta’s Gift Is Hybrid Immunity – Wall Street Journal
Politics is how we govern ourselves, so don’t imagine Covid data could ever have been unpoliticized. The CDC’s naming this week of a new analytics panel, featuring Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and John Hopkins’s Caitlin Rivers, does not change this reality. It opens a new chapter.
How so? From the start, our mistake has been our strange reticence to recognize the reality of mild or symptomless Covid. It began on day one with the World Health Organization and certain experts choosing to exaggerate Covid’s deadliness by ignoring mild and unseen cases. The same myopia continues to play havoc today with our ability to answer a crucial question: How rampant is the Delta variant among the vaccinated? The U.S. is hopelessly trying to draw conclusions from unrepresentative data.
In the Massachusetts outbreak that set off government alarm bells, more than 300 vaccinated holiday-makers later tested positive. Were they 100% or 1% of those who returned home with the virus? No idea.
In Chicago, 127 of 203 cases associated with the Lollapalooza music festival were fully vaccinated people. Same question. Are they the tip or the whole iceberg? No clue.
With more young Covid victims landing in hospitals, is this because Delta is more virulent or because there’s a lot more Delta than we know? Again, your government doesn’t have the foggiest.
Now three extra vaccinated U.S. senators have come down with Covid this week.
This chosen myopia about unseen unfold has proved expensive however in ways in which trace at its political utility. In January 2020, we may inform ourselves Covid wasn’t right here as a result of we hadn’t detected any circumstances. Later, when the pandemic was in full swing, overplaying the loss of life danger and underplaying pure immunity helped to rally assist for lockdowns, masking and vaccine rollout compliance.
Nonetheless, why would scientists like Anthony Fauci and CDC leaders be happy with insufficient knowledge? One affordable presumption is that individuals don’t ask questions they don’t need the solutions to. …
Delta has made such motivated myopia now not sustainable. The Covid-causing virus is a single-strand RNA virus—i.e., susceptible to frequent mutation, just like the flu, which requires a brand new vaccine yearly.
The general public is being hit with absurdly late-to-the-news headlines saying Covid will not be going away. Its favorite media-approved epidemiologists now warn that everybody should get it ultimately. Harvard’s Michael Mina breaks the information that not the worst factor proper now could be vaccinated folks getting asymptomatic Delta infections—a “booster” shot in opposition to future variants more likely to be as strong as any the federal government will probably be handing out.
And extra absurd than ever is social-media censorship of consultants who say something barely sophisticated about masks or vaccine hesitancy as if their discordant ideas should nonetheless be suppressed within the identity of eliminating Covid perpetually.
This propaganda is now detrimental to the actual aim. The approaching shock for People is that hybrid immunity, or vaccination plus inevitable publicity to an evolving virus, is our new means out. As a lot, because it was proper to attempt to soften this adjustment, have a look at Japan at the moment, with Tokyo hospitals close to collapse underneath the load of a Delta outbreak. Take a look at New Zealand, a whole nation locked down over what was initially a single Delta case. These nations have but to discover a technique to make peace with the virus and permit pure immunity to play its function in domesticating a brand new and unwelcome visitor …
It’s Time To Purge The “Experts” – ZeroHedge
… The public health failures during COVID could—and no doubt will—fill several books. But the botched investigations and repeated mendacity surrounding the question of whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are particularly enraging—not to mention the U.S. funding of “gain of function” research conducted there championed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Speaking of the hubris of the expert class, Fauci wrote last year that WHO and the UN should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” in order to avoid future pandemics. Considering their repeated record of abject failure, putting the international experts in charge of such an all-encompassing project would probably return us to the caves
And look what has happened in the medical sector where our experts are helping drive the transgender moral panic. Major medical journals and associations even promote puberty blocking for children despite its being, at best, entirely experimental and potentially physically harmful to the patients. Good grief, the American Medical Association even urges that we stop listing the sex of children on birth certificates!
And we haven’t even yet mentioned the misbegotten California public policies recommended by climate change experts that have reduced the once Golden State to a third world environment of rolling blackouts, out-of-control wildfires, and inadequate water storage because no new reservoirs have been built for decades—this, even though the state’s population grew exponentially. Good grief, farmers in the Central Valley have begun plowing under their precious almond trees!
Failure after dismal failure has caused mass distrust in the expert class and a concomitant collapse of confidence in our institutions.
This is a profound crisis. We need expertise. People who know what they are talking about and who can explain complicated issues to policy makers and the people are essential to the proper operation of sophisticated democratic societies.
But to do that job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats. Most of all, they need to put personal ideology aside in the performance of their duties and welcome heterodox opinions. For example, it wasn’t ideology that created the triumph of the moon landing. It was dispassionate excellence in rocket science and engineering.
The problem is that too many of our current “experts”—in foreign policy, law enforcement, science, education, the medical intelligentsia, the list goes on and on—have become highly politicized. Some even now think they should be deciders rather than advisers. That attitude doesn’t make policy more expertly based, it makes expertise more politically motivated, which is to say, it ceases being expert at all.
Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated? – COVID-DataScience
… In this post, I will focus on vaccine efficacy vs. severe disease/hospitalization, which is the key factor for public health. I will not deal with vaccine efficacy vs. symptomatic or asymptomatic disease here — that has its own set of nuances that I will save for a future post.
… In conclusion, as long as there is a major age disparity in vaccination rates, with older individuals being more highly vaccinated, then the fact that older people have an inherently higher risk of hospitalization when infected with a respiratory virus means that it is always important to stratify results by age; if not the overall efficacy will be biased downwards and a poor representation of how well the vaccine is working in preventing serious disease (the same holds for efficacy vs. death). Even more fundamentally, it is important to use infection and disease rates (per 100k, e.g.) and not raw counts to compare unvaccinated and vaccinated groups to adjust for the proportion vaccinated. Use of raw counts exaggerates the vaccine efficacy when vaccinated proportion is low and attenuates the vaccine efficacy when, like in Israel, vaccines proportions are high. This is not just an issue of making vaccines look worse than they are … any summary computing “proportion of hospitalized that are unvaccinated” that covers a period of time in which the proportion vaccinated was low can be similarly misleading, especially if there was a massive Covid-19 surge during that time periods. For example, computing total proportion of hospitalized covid infections in the USA from unvaccinated individuals while aggregating over the entire 2021 (January to present), a time periods that includes the early months in which virtually all USA residents were unvaccinated and there was a massive winter surge, will be similarly misleading. Thus, these artifacts can be used by some to make the vaccines look better than they in fact are, e.g. any report suggesting things like 99.9% of hospitalizations are from unvaccinated when covering a long period of time like this.
The bottom line is there is very strong evidence that the vaccines have high efficacy protecting against severe disease, even for Delta, and even in these Israeli data that on the surface appear to suggest the Pfizer vaccine might have waning efficacy. This is clearly evident if the data are analyzed carefully, and agrees with all other published results to date from other countries.
While this is just a snapshot of currently active infections on August 15, 2021, the principles apply to other analyses done on Israeli data, as well as others.
One caveat with any efficacy analyses with the Israeli dashboard data is that the previously infected are not separated out. Note that:
Israel did not allow previously infected to be vaccinated until 3 months into the vaccination campaign (in March)
Then made only optional (given they awarded immunity passports to previously infected even if unvaccinated) and only limited them to one shot.
Given the high vaccination rate, it is plausible that a substantial proportion of unvaccinated were previously infected. Given the overwhelming evidence that previous infection confers strong and lasting immune protection from dozens of published papers, this means those unvaccinated have strong immune protection (possible comparable to vaccinated). This would serve to attenuate the efficacy estimates, and may be one reason why the efficacy vs. severe disease is not higher than 85-92%. Also, this might make their single-dose efficacy appear much higher than other places since it also includes those previously infected who were eventually vaccinated. More caveats to keep in mind …
[editor’s note: this post deserves a full read as I omitted the backup explanations for the conclusion]
Vaccine resistance in the military remains strong, a dilemma for Pentagon as mandate looms – Washington Post
The Pentagon’s effort to mandate coronavirus vaccination for all 1.3 million active-duty service members will continue to face resistance from a segment of the force, troops and observers say, until military leaders devise an effective strategy for countering pervasive doubt about the pandemic’s seriousness and widespread misinformation about the shots designed to bring it under control.
When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced earlier this month that he would seek to require inoculation no later than mid-September, Pentagon data showed that thousands of personnel — about one-third of the force — remained unvaccinated. President Biden quickly endorsed the move.
The looming mandate comes as the virus’s highly transmissible delta variant fuels a new wave of infections globally, and after Biden, in what was widely seen as a signal to state and local governments and the private sector that they should follow suit, directed agencies throughout the federal government to implement proof-of-vaccination requirements or impose restrictions on employees who refuse. For military personnel, administration officials have said, the need is particularly urgent.
… The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to address vaccine hesitancy within the ranks.
Vaccine rates have varied widely between the individual service branches. In July, before Austin’s announcement, the Navy led the way with more 70 percent of its personnel fully vaccinated. At the low end, fewer than 60 percent of Marines met that criteria.
Though Pentagon officials have made clear a mandate is imminent, and that those who refuse risk losing their jobs, inoculation has been voluntary since the vaccines were introduced over the winter — a rare optional task in an organization where orders are the norm. Anecdotally, it appears at least some have viewed the lack of a requirement as grounds to infer the shots might not be safe despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary — or even that they’re unnecessary if their health and physical fitness is otherwise good.
… Others pointed to past instances of forced exposure to vaccines or chemical agents, dating back to radiation tests and Agent Orange in Vietnam, as a potential explanation for the vaccine hesitancy that remains so pervasive. In 2004, a federal judge barred the Department of Defense from mandating an experimental anthrax vaccine after some service members who were inoculated years prior questioned whether there was a corollary to various ailments they had developed. More recently, questions have been raised among military veterans and medical professionals about health issues stemming from exposure to toxic substances at open-air burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What I’ve found from speaking to soldiers is that there are some who are, in a broad sense, skeptical of the government,” said Col. Joe Buccino, a military spokesperson for the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg who, as host of the unit’s podcast, has explored the question of vaccine hesitancy among Army personnel. “And that is probably drawn from a broader skepticism within the American population, probably going back to the early 1970s.”
[editor’s note: interesting article which deserves a full read]
Pandemic upends norms around peer-reviewed studies – The Hill
The seemingly insatiable demand for medical information during the pandemic has accelerated the practice of making emerging science more quickly available to scientists, lawmakers and the public.
That’s putting a spotlight on preprint studies — papers that are published before being peer-reviewed — at a time when the world is eager to learn about even the slightest change in the coronavirus.
But while experts welcome the increased accessibility and speed of preprints, their growing popularity also poses challenges since the public is essentially left to digest troves of complicated data and findings mostly on their own, sometimes leading to misinterpretation or misinformation.
Preprint studies are not a new phenomenon, but COVID-19 heightened public awareness of them because they provided information much sooner than waiting months or years for publication in a journal — a timeline that is not considered feasible during a pandemic when public health officials need to make decisions to prevent deaths.
“We cannot wait,” Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said. “We don’t have that kind of time when there is a deadly virus, and months of delays would cost thousands or more lives.”
MedRxiv, one of the biggest sites that publishes preprints, had only been running for about six months by January 2020. That month 217 manuscripts, all unrelated to COVID-19, were posted, compared to in May, when the server had 1,625 preprint studies on the virus published.
“If you wait for the peer review publication, you’re far behind in the field,” said Harlan Krumholz, one of medRxiv’s co-founders and a cardiologist at Yale University.
“I can either stick my head in the sand or I can realize this is just a new way of communicating science and clinical research,” he added.
MedRxiv said it screens the preprints before publishing them to ensure they’re not anonymous, and that they don’t contain any privacy violations, Krumholz said. The company also makes the call on whether it would be “harmful” to release the study before it’s peer reviewed.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Simple steps for coexisting with the coronavirus – CNN
As we prepare to head into our second fall with the coronavirus, it’s admittedly a strange time. On the one hand, the situation is better than last year, primarily because we have vaccines that are doing a terrific job of protecting the roughly 60% of Americans who are eligible and fully vaccinated, and to some extent, the additional 10% who have gotten their first dose.
But things are also worse, mainly because the very contagious and possibly more dangerous Delta variant currently makes up about 99% of the coronavirus in circulation in the United States. The Delta variant has caused an uptick in infections, hospitalizations and, sadly, deaths, especially in parts of the country where vaccination rates are lagging. To add to this worrying trend, serious disease requiring hospitalization is affecting younger and healthier age groups, including children.
What’s becoming clear is that we, locally and globally, are not going to be able to stamp out the coronavirus completely. Experts predict it’s going to become endemic, possibly joining the other four or so common cold coronaviruses in circulation.
“We’re not going to eradicate this coronavirus like we’ve done with smallpox; it is something that I think is going to settle into a more seasonal pattern, like the flu and colds …” said Linsey Marr, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and an expert in the transmission of infectious diseases via aerosols.
“But right now, because it’s novel and so many people are not immune to it, it’s really ripping through the population. But I think five years from now, we will have much greater immunity either through vaccination or natural infection,” she said.
That means we are going to have to learn to “dance” with the virus — a safe co-existence — without constantly stepping on each other’s toes.
[editor’s note: this article is worth a full read]
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Panic and desperation rose after the U.S. warned that Afghanistan’s Islamic State branch could attempt an attack to hurt Americans and damage the Taliban’s sense of control.
U.S. weighs ordering commercial airlines to provide flights for Afghanistan evacuation efforts
Kabul Reporter Tells of Airport Chaos and Strange Street Scenes Amid Taliban Takeover
Pentagon Confirms Americans Have Been Beaten in Afghanistan
US Tells Americans to Avoid Traveling to Kabul Airport Because of ‘Potential Security Threats’
The treacherous journey into Kabul airport to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
The British government is starting an antibody surveillance program.
Sri Lanka issues a lockdown to stem its Covid surge, and other news from around the world.
South Korea to get more Moderna COVID shots in boost to vaccination effort
Australia: Scores arrested at anti-coronavirus lockdown protests. At least seven police officers injured amid nationwide demonstrations against government’s COVID containment measures.
Germany enters 4th coronavirus wave. Germany’s Robert Koch Institute made the assessment as the country grapples with rising positive test results. This time, younger age groups are more affected.
The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Orlando residents were asked to cut back on water use for several weeks to preserve the city’s supply of liquid oxygen for treating patients.
Monoclonal antibodies are free and effective against covid-19, but few people are getting them
Media Turns On Biden: “Why Do You Continue To Trust The Taliban Mr. President?”
San Francisco Prepares To Suspend Cops And Firefighters Who Refuse To Disclose Vaccination Status
Get the vaccine or get fired? In Shenandoah Valley, some nurses choose termination.
Schools, colleges brace for cyberattacks as students return
Trump Booed at Alabama Rally After Encouraging Crowd to Get Vaccinated
Quarter of New COVID Cases in Florida Among Those 19 or Younger
Jesse Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, are hospitalized with Covid-19.
A radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies.
Health officials warn people not to treat Covid with a drug meant for livestock.
Hospital staff shortages in the U.S. are putting patients at risk.
Westbrook’s Abbott Labs refutes New York Times report that says they forced Maine workers to destroy COVID-19 test kits. Abbott Labs officials said, ‘We have not destroyed any finished BinaxNOW (COVID-19 test rapid) product, nor have we destroyed any usable test components.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tests negative for COVID-19 four days after positive test. The governor credited his vaccination for keeping his infection “brief and mild” and encouraged others to consider getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic and Recovery With Hyperlinks
Labor Productivity In A Pandemic
Unemployment Insurance: Economic Lessons From The Last Two Recessions
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 22August 2021
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 22August 2021
The Plague Year – America In The Time Of COVID
Millions To Lose Benefits As Pandemic Jobless Aid Expires
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.
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