Corona-zona

Last night on the news I heard/saw rather breathless coverage of how bad the coronavirus outbreak is becoming in Japan. A "frightening spike" in cases according to the BBC . "Record breaking cases" leading to and expanded "state of emergency" according to NPR . One conjures images of Godzilla wreaking havoc on Tokyo. Everybody has been expecting things to go south over there, given the country's low vaccination rate . A reliable source told me the low rate is partly because the Japanese got started very late with vaccinations. That's because they believe they are "genetically distinct" and wouldn't approve vaccines for use until they had been clinically tested on Japanese people.  M'kay. Now infections are cranking up just in time for the "2020" Olympics. But how bad are things over there, really?   Well, no doubt cases are spiking.  Here is a chart from Our World in Data  showing the seven-day trailing average over the ...

  Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) Director, Dr. Cara Christ, is stepping down from her post. She has been in charge of the department since 2015, including through the pandemic. She has endorsed virtually every move of the governor's  public illness campaign . It hunts down even the smallest effort in the State of Arizona mitigate spread of the virus and kills it via executive order. I doubt Dr. Christ is a actually member of the conservative death cult , but her boss certainly is and she has been his enabler. One wonders how a public health official like her could stomach endorsing his policies, knowing full well how reckless they are.  Former ADHS Director Will Humble , who was at one time Christ's mentor, believes she abrogated her responsibility. I agree with what he says : When you’re linked up with a governor who is pushing you in directions that you fundamentally disagree with, you have a responsibility to do your job, not to keep your job. ...

  I sub-titled Sunday's numbers roundup "Welcome to Surge 3.0." Was I being alarmist about the Delta-fueled increases? On one hand, there are some indications that the increase may be short-lived.  Case rates are now dropping in Britain .  In the past, case rates there lead changes in the U.S. by a few weeks.  Here's a chart from last year from the World Economic Forum illustrating the point: Of course, that is from the first surge last year and we don't know if it held true for the second, big surge last winter.   Dr. Scott Gottlieb has speculated that this increase could be over in August. That would be consistent with the Britain-leads-US idea.  He also said a likely scenario is that cases will increase in the northern states as they decline in the southern ones. I sure hope he's right that this will be more of a blip than a surge. Yet he was FDA head during the Trump Administration and is now a member of a conservative think-tank. That means I ca...

Scores of stories are appearing on mainstream and social media about people who are sick with COVID-19 because they didn't get vaccinated. Predictably, they now regret their choices. Among the cases: An Alabama mom watched her son die and got seriously ill herself. "It took watching my son die and me suffering the effects of covid for us to realize we need the vaccine. We did not get vaccinated when we had the opportunity and regret that so much now.” A Florida mother of eight  nearly died, spending six days in the ICU. "I was one of those people that was like, ‘I can’t believe people are just going to inject their bodies with this medication. We don’t know enough about it.’ Now I’m just like it’s just a shot. Just get the stupid shot. That vaccine could have stopped all of this. Just one little shot. I feel foolish that I didn’t get it. I wish to God I would have got it because it’s not just about what it could have prevented me from experiencing physically in my life r...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: As with last week, everything is heading in the wrong direction. Infection rates are up by 3-4 per 100K, percent positive tests is up. Delta now account for 2/3 of the sequences.   Here is a screenshot from the ASU dashboard of daily new cases (Xs) and a seven-day moving average of the same (yellow line).  It seems pretty clear that we are in Surge 3.0, with daily cases having almost tripled over the last three weeks. There are two changes to the table. First, I've started expressing COVID-19 inpatient beds as a percentage of beds available rather than as a raw number. That makes it a little easier to put the changes in context (IMO). If you want the raw numbers, you can find them on the ASU dashboard (linked above). It's encouraging that this number is only going up an average of around 1% per week, even though the infection rates are going up faster. Of course, there is a lag involved, so maybe hospitaliz...

  This blog will be off until next weekend as yours truly will be taking a much-needed vacation. But I just can't leave for a week without calling out Facebook (FB) for trying to play the victim the Biden administration's efforts to shame it for spreading anti-vax disinformation. First let us remember that FB has been trying to gaslight us  on this topic for months. They periodically announce new "crackdowns" on anti-vaxxers whenever the political heat gets too high. If any of these "crackdowns" had actually been effective, there would be no need for another one.  And make no mistake: If FB wanted to stop this garbage, they could. They have all the tools—the data, the graph analysis, the natural language processing, the machine learning algorithms, the compute power—to track down the vaccine mis/disinfo and get rid of it.  But FB doesn't want to do this. They want to appear to be doing it while continuing to make money off the traffic that mis/disinfo ...

  Here is the Arizona pandemic summary for the week just ended: These are some bad numbers , dear readers.  This is the first time since I've been doing this weekly summary (started Jan 17) that any increases on the order shown here have occurred.  If this isn't a new surge, its a kissing cousin. Everything is uniformly bad, except percent of population fully vaccinated.   A couple of rows have been removed from the table.  I removed S-gene dropouts per 100 tests because the numbers have dwindled—I assume because the Alpha variant is getting crowded-out by Delta.   There are continued problems getting information about percent of sequences that are Delta. For the last two weeks GIDAID has said that there is "no data" for Arizona for the preceding week.  I checked this week for last week's numbers, assuming there had been some reporting hicup. There were only 21 sequences, ten of which were Delta (shown as "1 week eralier" in the chart). ...

  Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is continuing his public illness campaign. This time he is banning schools from quarantining kids who have been exposed to COVID-19. He has already made it so schools can't require vaccinations and masks. Apparently, he feels that this did not do enough to promote public illness.  So Ducey has now sent a letter to schools saying they can't keep sick kids away, either. Y'know, so they can come in and transmit the more contagious Delta variant to all the unvaccinated, unmasked kids who haven't gotten it yet. Wow. I don't know what to say about this other than WTF? His behavior is unhinged and despicable. Normal governors do things to protect children. This one is doing the exact opposite, and with gusto.   To their credit, the schools are pushing back. They note that following guidance in Ducey's letter violates public health policy set by by the CDC, the Arizona Department of Health (i.e. Ducey's own agency), and the County heal...

  I was asked to help recruit participants for a study focused on children and teens’ experiences with the pandemic, called CoVHORT Children and Teens Study (CATS) . So that's the purpose of this post.   The study is currently open to those aged 12-17, regardless of current or previous COVID-19 status . Our study asks about having COVID-19, feelings and worries, school experience, racism, and what has helped them throughout the pandemic. Parent or guardian consent is required to enroll young people in the study. Please click this link  https://redcap.link/UAcovhortcats , if there are children in your home who may be interested in learning more about and enrolling in the study. You may also forward this link to anyone you feel may be interested in participating in the study. If you have any questions about the study, please visit https://covhort.arizona.edu/covhort-cats/about ,  email covhort-cats@arizona.edu or call (520) 626-0431.

  I have blogged before about long-haul COVID-19 symptoms and why they should make the disease more salient to young people. The CDC has a long list of symptoms that can persist long after the infection recedes. It includes things like breathing difficulties, brain fog, heart palpitations, dizziness, mood changes, rash, diarrhea, and menstrual period changes. Now it appears there is a new problem, likely to be of greater concern to younger people, particularly males. It appears that COVID-19 can cause male sexual problems. There is evidence that an infection may  cause lasting erectile dysfunction . As pointed out in that link, there is lots of anecdotal support for this idea. But experimental studies have not yet been done comparing males of similar age with similar health who did and did not have COVID-19.  A  paper  looking at relevant medical literature concludes that it is entirely plausible: Endothelial dysfunction, subclinical hypogonadism, psychologica...

  That is a screenshot of the NBA finals in Milwaukee on Sunday night.  Commentators said 10,000 Bucks fans were on hand outside the Fiserv Forum (what a terrible name!) to cheer on their team.  A similar "watch party" took place in Phoenix. I'm guessing every single one of the people pictured are in the 18-24 age range.  Here's what the CDC says about the age demographics of people who are fully vaccinated: People 18-24 have the lowest vaccination rate of any age group, and the rate is basically the same for those with one shot.  And there they are, without masks, in close quarters, screaming and yelling, generating and inhaling each other's aerosolized saliva plume s.  In other words, what you see in the picture is a superspreader event in the making.  Such events are making a comeback .  Earlier this month I blogged about one such event in an Illinois summer camp.  An even larger outbreak occurred in a Texas church camp.  Other eve...

  It's clear that vaccination rates are stalling in the U.S., with about 30%  of the population vaccinated. This makes efforts to encourage hesitant people more important than ever. An op-ed published yesterday in Scientific American highlights the role local celebrities have to play in delivering such messages.  It has been known for some time that trusted messengers are important sources of information about the importance of getting vaccinated.  This is particularly true for marginalized groups who have a well-founded distrust of the medical establishment.  But even for non-marginalized groups, who does the encouraging is important. As the op-ed points out, people have known local celebrities—like news, sports, and weather reporters—for years.  Audiences develop parasocial relationships with such people and trust them because of it. This is the reason you often see sportscasters or meteorologists doing local TV commercials. These sources are seen as...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic summary numbers for the week just ended: This week, all three case-related numbers are in the red.  Cases per 100K are still in the fraction-of-a-percent range, but they have been that way for three weeks, meaning they are steadily creeping up.  Also hospital bed numbers are increasing, meaning more of those are serious cases. S-gene dropouts (indicating the Alpha variant) are dropping like a rock. That's probably because Alpha is getting crowded out by Delta. But we can't know because the GISAID website is reporting no data for Arizona over the last week. Why that is, I don't know. Hopefully it will be fixed next week and I can update things. Here is the vaccine accelerometer: We are back down to fraction-of-a-percent increases. This reinforces my speculation that the spike last week was due some kind of reporting anomaly.   At least we now have over half of the population with one shot now.  According to the JHU tally ...

  Several items about the Delta variant have been coming across my news feed regarding the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing it. They are somewhat alarmist and a little confusing about exactly what they're claiming is being protected against.  This article in Bloomberg reports that in Israel, protection from the Pfizer jab dropped from 94% to 64%. A little more than half of new infections were among vaccinated people.   There was a slight increase in serious illness, to 35 cases on July 4 (up from 21 cases in June) in a population of 9.3 million. They don't say how many of those were among vaccinated people—perhaps none.  In any case that's about a 1 in 265,000 chance of getting seriously ill. You're two times  more likely to die  by a lightning strike than having that happen. Another expert says it's too early to draw conclusions about any change in effectiveness because of the low overall number of cases among vaccinated adults.  He als...

  A friend recently sent me a link to an article about how kids in the UK are faking COVID-19 tests to get out of school .  The tests in question are "lateral flow tests" that check whether anything in the sample binds to antibodies embedded in the test strips.   To take the test, you get a sample from your nose, then dissolve it in a buffer solution. You then pour that into the plastic test rig, and if a "test" line shows up the match a "control" line on the test strip, you're positive. This guy goes into details of how the tests work. It's kind of interesting, and you can read it if you're into things like that. But the scam has to do with that buffer solution. Not only does it dilute the mucus sample into something that can flow through the test rig, it also ensures that it is at a neutral pH level (acid-base) required for the antibodies to work and detect viruses. What the kids do is replace the buffer with some acidic substance like juice...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: There are increases again this week in the new case numbers. The increases are fractions of a percent, but if they are consistent every week they will start adding up. Unlike last week the positive test rate has decreased slightly. S-Gene dropouts (which indicate the Alpha variant) continue to decline, and the Delta sequences are up, suggesting Delta is crowding-out Alpha. That is not good a Delta is estimated to be 60% more contagious than Alpha (which was itself about 50% more contagious than the original strain). Much to my surprise, we had a surge in vaccinations last week.  Here is the accelerometer: It is such an increase, especially in people fully vaccinated, I wonder if it's not due to some reporting snafu that got corrected. The other possibility is that unvaccinated people are scared of Delta, which they should be. I had occasion to take a look at the AZ vaccination rates in different age groups, so I...

  The other day there was an article in The Guardian about an anti-vax group called the Informed Consent Action Group (ICAN). It is using threats of litigation to intimidate schools, employers, and other organizations who require their members to have vaccinations. As a lawyer quoted in the article said, they do not need to be able to win court cases on the merits. They only need to convince organizations it's too risky to resist their demands: “If you have a limited budget to deal with litigation, it doesn’t matter if you might win at the supreme court level. The costs of that litigation are so existentially threatening that you’re not going to take the risk.” It's a shame that tactics like that work. So far when these things have gone to court, the anti-vaxxers have lost .   What is behind these attacks on vaccinations? It appears it may be another case of anti-vaxxing for dollars .  The Guardian reports that in 2019 ICAN raked in and spent $3.5 million....

  A Central Illinois summer "camp" for kids had an outbreak of COVID-19 affecting 85 people at the facility, and cross-infecting 11 people at a conference being held nearby. According to reports , most of those affected at Crossing Camp in Rushville, about 60 miles northwest of Springfield, were kids. One kid was hospitalized. The camp was not checking the vaccination status of kids attending, and reportedly only a few of the attendees and staffers had been vaccinated.  The camp said it was following CDC guidelines for cleaning and sanitation.   A few comments about this.  First, what is it with Illinois and mass infections?  Three months ago I blogged about another event that took place in a bar by someone who knew they were infected. Aren't Midwesterners supposed to be cautious and pragmatic?  Illinois ain't Florida! Second, a kid was sent to the hospital. This shows that the virus is still not to be taken lightly, even for young people.  ...