Corona-zona

  This will be a short post today. I'm giving you an assignment and you'll need time to work on it.  Does anybody but you have a copy of your vaccination record? It never occurred to me before I read this helpful article from CNN, but since I did not get my vaccination at my physician's office, it may not be part of my medical record. The simple solution is to get a copy of your vaccination certificate to your physician. You can take it along next time you have an appointment and let them copy it. My physician now has an online patient portal, as I think many do. I was able to take a pic of my vaccination record and upload it to that portal so they can add it to my record. Individual states also maintain immunization records.  There is a list here . I went to the link for Arizona, and on the page found a link for Arizona myIR which is apparently a database maintained by/for the state.  I set up an account and it matched my existing records.  Much to my surprise...

Today's post is by Corona-zona Senior Southeast Asia Correspondent PBR Hello from the S’pore!!! Or SIN as the International Air Transport Association ( IATA) airport code labels this place. That code has gotten some folk in a tizzy in the past. Weirdos. This update, using the parlance of the young ‘uns, may be considered a flex. But hey, it is an update about this City in a Garden ™ and I’m just sharing a couple pieces of pandemic-related information. First, we are where all Asian parents want their kids to be—Number One baby! Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking puts us there and we are not turning it down. Bloomberg claims we are the place where the pandemic is being handled most successfully while avoiding significant social and economic disruption. The U.S. is number 17 as it stands. Now that I have stated it, I worry I may have jinxed the situation. Sorry Singapore. (Of course, when rankings in other areas are bad, we just ignore it. The gag here is that the pro-gov...

  Last month I did a post about some guy trying to "debunk" masks by providing us with all the devastating scientific evidence that masks don’t work. Turns out that, on careful examination, his scientific evidence was bunk.  People like this try to " baffle 'em with bullshit ," counting on most people not knowing how to read the studies they cite and/or being too lazy to do so.   A few days ago I saw a story about a study proving that masks are harmful.   It was published in an outlet called Medical Hypotheses. That journal publishes ideas, not actual research, so their articles don't "prove" anything.   The author claimed to be affiliated with Stanford.   Stanford has said he is not affiliated with them. You can draw your own conclusions regarding what that says about his credibility. I looked at the abstract, which says there is no scientific evidence of masks’ effectiveness. That is straight-up wrong.  Look here . Readers, I don’t have...

  Here are some updates on previous Corona-zona posts. Toilet Aerosols…Ewww Previous posts have discussed how the virus spreads, mostly focusing on how masks stop transmission of aerosols emitted from one’s mouth. Now there’s a new potential source.   It has been known for some time that SARS-CoV-2 can infect one’s gut and be expelled with feces. Those feces (hopefully) go into a toilet, and guess what happens when you flush the toilet.   You get aerosols, lots of them .   According to a scientist quoted in the article: Both the toilet and urinal generated large quantities of droplets smaller than three micrometers in size, posing a significant transmission risk if they contain infectious microorganisms. Due to their small size, these droplets can remain suspended for a long time. As the article points out, there are no documented cases of COVID-19 being spread this way. But it is a possibility. Gnome Shortages Back in January, I did the first post abo...

  Here is the Arizona numbers summary for the week just ended: All the non-vaccine numbers are headed in the wrong direction. But neither the one week nor four week change is very large.   Since I started doing these weekly stats in January, this is the first time  that the hospital number has increased. But it too is a small increase of only about 4% from last week. Here is the Arizona vaccination accelerometer: This is also disappointing, showing deceleration for both any shot and both shots, especially any shot. It's more evidence that the state may be approaching a vaccine wall , were increasingly more people who want the shot have gotten it and we are now dealing with hesitant and hard-to-reach populations. Assuming we are not too close to the wall yet, with 64% of our population vaccinated and that number increasing at 4-5% a week, it won't be long before we reach the magic number of 70% for population immunity.  That is assuming that everybody ...

  It's hard to find a story about surging COVID-19 that does not site variants as a cause.  Here's a sampling of headlines: Inslee warns of fourth Covid surge in Washington as variants spread ( Washington State ) COVID variant likely driving current case surge, Ballad officials say ( Tennessee ) Whitmer says Michigan’s COVID-19 surge is due to variants and non-compliance, ‘not a policy problem’ ( Michigan ) If all of these claims are true, then we should be able to observe it: States that have have more variants should have bigger surges. To test this, I got two pieces of data from the CDC for each state. First, from this page I got the "variants of concern" for each state where data was listed.  CDC only included states that, in their judgment, had a sufficient number of samples sequenced to make the numbers meaningful. The data covered four weeks ending March 27.  "Variants of concern" (VOC) are ones for which there is sufficient evidence that the mutatio...

This morning I was once again treated to a  story  in my news feed about how hard Facebook is working on our behalf to rid it's site of anti-vaxxer disinformation. This time the claim is from Carolyn Everson, VP of Facebook's Global Business Group. They are taking very aggressive measures! It's a top priority for the company! It's a major cultural pivot! What a steaming load of bullshit! I just went on to FB and typed "vaccine" into the search box and filtered the results for groups. The top two items were Vaccines Save Lives and Nurses Who Vaccinate . Good. Then came two groups dedicated to reporting side effects, Report COVID-19 Side Effects  (8400 members, 200 posts a day) and  COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects (137K members, 1100 posts a day). I had a look at the latter, and it contains a mix of good and bad reports. But it also contains posts like "But a very good friend of mine was rushed to hospital with blood clots, nearly died, that’s not been repor...

  It has always puzzled me how one can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and not show any symptoms. After all, the bug has invaded you and has hijacked your cells to make copies of itself, rather than doing what they're supposed to be doing. How can that be? A new study just published in Nature Medicine sheds some light on the matter.  The authors claim it is the first study to compare the immune responses of people who have no symptoms to the immune responses of people with a more serious infection. The actual study is full of big words that are probably only meaningful to an immunologist. Fortunately a helpful science reporter has dumbed it down to the point where I can understand it.   Essentially, people who have asymptomatic infections have high levels of B cells (a type of white blood cell) in their noses and other mucous passages. These cells detect pathogens and help initiate an immune response. These cells were missing in people with more serious infections. P...

Arizona's Governor, eager to show he can eat marshmallows with the best of 'em,  issued an order rescinding the requirement that students in schools wear masks.  Thankfully, he did not try to preclude school districts making their own choices, and many are keeping their mask requirements. Dr. Josh LaBaer with ASU’s Biodesign Institute told reporters  this is no time to be making such changes as more contagious strains are taking over.  He said the UK variant is showing up in 60%-80% of samples sequenced by his lab. That may be the case in his lab, but according to the CDC the California variant is the predominant one.  Here's a visualization of how they break things out: The California variant is worrisome because it can evade antibodies produced by infection or vaccination. As I wrote on Monday , it's a likely reason AZ has more than twice the breakthrough case rate of the nation as a whole. Whatever variant is at work, it is particularly dangerous for youn...

  Busy work day, so just a short post today to commend to you an essay on the toll the pandemic has taken on health care workers.  It's a collaboration between The Guardian and Kaiser Health Foundation, and it's entitled  12 Months of Trauma: More Than 3,600 US Health Workers Died in Covid’s First Year .  If you're pressed for time or would rather have an audio experience, there is an NPR summary here . More than 100 journalists contributed. Among the sobering findings: More than half the victims were under 60. One-third were from outside the US Nurses and support staff died at higher rates than physicians Twice as many died in nursing homes as in hospitals Image by Guardian/KHF

Last week I had a post about so-called "breakthrough" cases, i.e. people who get COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. The post noted that Arizona has a rate more than twice the national average. I asked an epidemiologist I know, who until recently worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, why that might be.  Here are the three answers I got.   Reopening and Mixing "One possibility is that reopening has increased mixing among the population and our case numbers are rising again, meaning more exposures than in places with lower case rates." This is true to some extent in Arizona.   As reported in my most recent by the numbers post, a small increase in infection rates started in Arizona about a month ago. Probably not coincidentally, this was shortly after the governor issued a reopening order .   But the rise wasn't that big, increasing only about 2 cases per 100K over the period. Also Arizona is in the lowest tier of states for infect...

 Here are the Arizona numbers for the week just ended: All the one-week change numbers in are in the right direction this week, although all the COVID related changes are small.  The four-week numbers show increases because it was about four weeks ago the numbers started to risk.   In general, though, things are pretty stable in Arizona and there is no sign of a Michigan-like surge. Here is the vaccine accelerometer for this week: We are back to acceleration on both measures this week, but the amounts of acceleration are small.  Could this be an indication that we were encountering a " vaccine wall " here? Something is going on.  For the first time the JHU vaccine page lists Arizona below the national average for fully vaccinated people. Not long ago we were near the top of the rankings. Top Image by  Shutterbug75  from  Pixabay

  Bill Gates has been the target of a lot of crackpot vaccine conspiracy theories.  One of the more mundane ones is that he created the SARS-CoV-2 virus so he could make money selling vaccine. Because he doesn't have enough money already? Another one says he created the virus so everybody would need to get vaccinated. This would give him the opportunity to use the injections to insert microchips into us.  For some reason that is never really explained. And that doesn't even cover the field.  He's been called to voodoo doll of conspiracy theorists. Gates claims he was " very surprised " by these theories. Really?  You'd think he would expect something like this after he was accused in 2018, well before the pandemic, of having a plan to depopulate the planet. But a recent essay in The New Republic criticizes Gates in a way that is based more on things that might have, y'know, actually happened. It claims that Gates undermined efforts by the World Health ...

  Now that we have large numbers of people vaccinated, epidemiologists are starting to get a good idea of what rate of "breakthrough" cases we can expect. Those are cases where people who have been fully vaccinated become infected anyway. Public health officials stress that vaccines aren't perfect and breakthrough cases are expected. Here in Arizona, ADHS says there have been 271 cases. In the state we have 1,551,172 people fully vaccinated (according to Johns Hopkins ).  That works out to a rate of 0.017% or one chance in 5,882 of being infected despite vaccination.   Nationally, the rate is much lower.  CDC is reporting  about 5600 cases among 70,811,070 vaccinated people. That works out to 0.008% or one chance in 12,500. In both cases, many infections are asymptomatic. Of those that aren't, few require hospitalization, and deaths are rare. Why the Arizona rate is more than twice the national rate is unknown and something ADHS should be looking into....

  We've all gotten familiar with masks and their limitations over the past year. There is no doubt that they work  (at least if they're not fake ), but they have problems. Leakage is one that can currently only be addressed with external appliances . Another is comfort.  Since masks are a big market, lots of people are trying to design a better virus-trap. Predictably, there are high-tech entries.  Razer is designing one , but it's not for sale yet. One that is for sale, assuming you have $299 to drop on a mask, is the Xupermask . It is a collaboration between Will.i.am and Honeywell (?). Both of these things have N95 filtration, active ventilation, speakers, and Bluetooth. The Xupermask has noise cancelling headphones too, for some reason.  They also look like they'd be at home in a Mad Max movie (assuming the post-apocalyptic landscape still has power to charge the masks).  While these entries are a little over-the top, they are at least designed to...

Back in February I had a post about Florida Governor and all around douche-nozzle Ron DeSantis bragging about how his do-nothing approach to the virus had resulted in no worse outcomes than California.  What a difference two months makes! Yesterday, local media in Florida were reporting about record new infections and positivity rate. The state is not as bad the Upper Midwest, but it's close, and its definitely an anomaly in the Southeast.  Here is today's new cases map from the CDC : That's a new case rate in Florida of 183.8 per 100K, 7-day average.  It's not as bad as Michigan (510.5), but it's closing in on Pennsylvania (234.5) and New York minus NYC (235.6). How is the comparison with California holding up?  Here is a graph of new cases per 100K 7-day average I made with data collected from the CDC's Socrata API: Two days ago (latest available data from CDC) the difference was over 3x. I pray that a reporter will shove a microphone in Gov. Florida Man...

Have you gotten used to working in your sweatpants? Grabbing a quick snack from your fridge before the Zoom meeting? Taking a quick break from that spreadsheet to play with the dog? Not driving in a traffic jam twice a day? Are you thinking you'd rather not give all that up?   If so, you're not alone. The reasons people don't want to go back to the office range from a loss of freedom and convenience to what seems like a form of agoraphobia .  According to an article in Newsweek, the leadership consulting firm Best Practices Institute (BPI) has done a study finding that 83 percent of CEOs want employees to return in person, while only 10 percent of employees want to do so.  The latter figure sounds low to me.  90% don't want to go back? I can't find this study anywhere, including the BPI website .  A  blog post , apparently by them, doesn't mention these numbers either. Pew pegs the number who want to keep working from home at 54% which sounds mo...

The results are in (literally). They show that having a previous case of COVID-19 gives someone a 7x lower chance of being reinfected.  A study published last week in The Lancet looked at staff of publicly funded hospitals in all regions of England.  Participants were enrolled between June and December of last year. After all the typical withdrawals and exclusions, the study included 25,661 participants.  These poeople were assigned to two groups depending on whether they had a positive anti-body test and/or a previous positive PCR test (positive cohort) or not (negative cohort). Participants were given PCR and antibody testing every two to four weeks.  Because the study period overlapped the vaccine rollout in the UK, the study tracked and controlled for whether participants were vaccinated. There were 8278 people in the positive cohort and they had 155 infections. There were 17,383 people in the negative cohort and they had 1704 infections.  Because par...

  Here are the Arizona numbers for the week just ended: Like last week, there are small increases in cases in Maricopa County and statewide.  Positive tests are flat, and there is a small increase in COVID-19 hospital beds, but nothing to get too excited about as it's 4 beds across the whole state. The other COVID-19 hospital metrics on the ASU dashboard , ER visits and ICU beds look stable too. Perhaps this is evidence that the vaccines are doing their jobs, now that half of Arizonans have have one shot, and one-fifth are fully vaccinated. Unfortunately it was another slowing week on the vaccination front.  Here is the accelerometer: The any-shot increase fell by about 3/4 of a percent compared to last week.  I don't know what is going on with the both-shots data.  The JHU dashboard showed a lower number than last week (I set the change to zero since people can't be unvaccinated). I assume this is due to some kind of correction to the numbers. If so it must be...

  Today, I offer for your reading enjoyment updates on some topics discussed previously in this blog. Surges I've recently written about worries over new surges .  A piece in today's NYT declares the pandemic out-of-control in Michigan.  Sadly, the governor there has been cowed into tepid pleas for responsible behavior in lieu of concrete action. Hard to blame her after armed covidiots plotted to kidnap and execute her. I hope those assholes are on ventilators right now.   The surge there is blamed on the UK variant, which is apparently taking over the country .  The good news is that the vaccines seem pretty effective against it. The vaccine makers are also working on boosters , expected by the end of the year.    That's good news.  The bad news is that there's a... Vaccine Wall As predicted here a month ago, vaccination rates are hitting a wall. We're starting to run out of people who want the shots. It's starting to show, especially in...