Corona-zona

  As noted in yesterday's weekly numbers update , I have been puzzled about why the positive test percentage in Arizona has been consistently trending down when new cases have been consistently  trending up. After all, it takes a test to identify a case, so it seems like the positive test percentage should go up as the new case rate goes up. The ASU Biodesign Dashboard has data on raw numbers of positive a negative tests.  So I downloaded that data and had a look.   One thing to note is that the number of tests has gone way up over the last month.  On August 6 the seven-day total was about 66K tests.  By August 28 the seven-day total was about 97K tests—almost a 50% increase. Of course, more testing don't explain the mystery downtrend by itself. But things become clearer when we look at the trends in positive vs. negative tests (dotted lines are trendlines): As we can see, both positive and negative tests are trending upward, but negative tests are t...

  Here is the summary of Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: This is really not looking good. New cases for Maricopa County took a big jump, and statewide the increase is double what it was last week . The trend can be most clearly seen in the seven-day average of new cases: I should mention that the value for the 25th is "imputed" (the average of the 24th and the 26th). Data was not available for the 25th due to an outage of the state dashboard.  Anyway, that's a qualitative change on the 24th. It makes the line look more like an exponential curve (where the increase for a given day is more than the increase for the previous day. We are also close to matching the peak in July of last year. That was 3,844 cases (seven-day average) on July 6th. The number yesterday was 3,741.  The way we are going, we will easily exceed the July 2020 peak number this week. Safe to say the numbers did not peak in mid-August as Dr. Scott Gottlieb optimistically predicted at th...

Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has had his wings clipped by a Florida judge.  The judge threw out his ban on mask mandates in schools.  The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by parents who were worried about their kids getting exposed to the virus while at school.  The judge concluded that mandated mask use is "reasonable and consistent with the best scientific and medical opinion in this country." DeSantis had planned to withhold funds from schools who defied his ban. The judge said he would issue an injunction prohibiting that.   The judge also suggested, essentially, that DeSantis should grow up and look for solutions rather than throwing bombs in the culture war.  "We will not solve any issue if we can't sit down and work together and take positions recognizing what's going on is not some recent imposition or some attack on the country," he said. Somebody buy that judge a beer.  Apparently not everyone in Florida is equal parts stupid and d...

  NBC poll results released two days ago give the latest picture of those who have and haven't taken vaccines. The poll was among 1000 adults and was collected August 14-17.   They report raw numbers , but what fun is that? I turned those numbers into charts for your viewing enjoyment. Here is the breakdown of vaccination status: Sixty-nine percent of respondents say they are vaccinated. As of now, about ten days after data collection,  JHU reports that 52.3% of Americans are fully vaccinated. So that is a bit of a discrepancy.  There are three explanations (which aren't mutually exclusive):  The sample isn't representative of the population as a whole.  This is possible, but you'd think NBC would pop for a good sample. The question is poorly worded.  It is at the least ambiguous. The relevant response option asks "Have you already gotten the vaccine?" So the number may be high because it mixes people who have gotten both doses and those who've ...

It seems that some people, instead of taking a vaccine proven safe and effective hundreds of millions of times, are taking horse medicine instead. That's a special kind of stupid, and as comedian Ron White reminds us, you can't fix stupid . The horse medicine in question is ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic worms. It apparently has approved uses and dosages in humans, but horses are, y'know, a lot bigger than humans.   The FDA says it "has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses."  They are so concerned about this they are tweeting at people to knock it off: The "treatment" has become especially popular in the U.S. South. A state health officer in Mississippi  called  the practice "kind of crazy" and likened it to getting chemotherapy at a feed store. I've not been able to track down where the idea to use ivermectin for...

  Here is the pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: Despite my optimism that new cases might be leveling off last week, we are back to increases both at the state level and the Maricopa County level. The increases are small but not as small as last week. We can see that that the upward trend is pretty consistent can be seen in the graph of state-level cases over the last two months: The new case rate is six times what it was two months ago.  At least the line doesn't look exponential over the last month.   The only bright side is that positive test percentage is dropping slightly.  Otherwise, the COVID-19 hospital bed percentage increased by a little more than it did last week.  A bit over one-fifth of beds are occupied by people who wouldn't be there had they taken the vaccine. I have dropped the line in the summary table for the Delta variant because it is making up nearly all of the cases now.  It will continue to do so until some new va...

  The Lincoln Project has a new spot out "honoring" COVIDiot AZ Governor Doug Ducey for his Orwellian plan to funnel COVID-19 relief funding to schools that are not relieving COVID-19.

  I heard last nigh t that 96% of Intensive Care beds in Texas are occupied by COVID-19 patients, with only 300 available statewide. Some huge percentage (like 95%) of those are occupied by people who refused to get a vaccine proven safe and effective 367 million times in the U.S. Is that fair? What if a vaccinated person has some non-COVID health emergency, or a vaccinated person has a serious breakthrough infection? Should they have to compete for ICU beds with people who didn't bother to protect themselves, often for political reasons? No, it's not fair. That's why I'm happy to see that Dallas hospitals are  considering adding vaccination status to the things it considers in triage decisions.  This would only go into effect if the hospitals become overwhelmed and have zero ICU beds available. Vaccination status would only be one factor, but it would be a factor.  An important principle of triage is that you allocate care resources to patients that are most likely...

  I swear I am not making this up. Some anti-vaxxers believe that people who took "experimental" vaccines will suffer horrible consequences over time, causing society to crumble.  At this point, semen from unvaccinated males will soar in value because it will be needed to reconstitute the human race. Semen from unvaccinated men will become the next bitcoin, and they will be able to put themselves out to stud. Sounds like a fun way to make a living, but of course all of this is bullshit. People who have been vaccinated are not experiencing any effects except staying safe from COVID-19. Another important detail is that there is no such thing as vaccinated/unvaccinated semen, because the vaccine doesn't affect genetics or sperm production. As they are wont to do, these fruitcakes find and misapply sciencey concepts to make their crackpot theories sound credible. In this case it's the idea of "vaccine shedding" which only happens with live virus vaccines. Non...

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is busy tying up loose ends in his public illness campaign. This time, he has issued an executive order threatening city officials with arrest and prosecution if they require vaccines for their workers.   Because of course he has. We mustn't force people to take a vaccine that has been proven safe and effective over 357 million times in the U.S., including 7 million times in Arizona, and is the only thing known that can bring the pandemic to an end. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero isn't having it. She issued a statement that is worth quoting at length: Governor Ducey is paving the way for COVID-19 to spread uncontrollably throughout our state, and attempting to impede those of us who believe in science-based solutions at the local level. After consulting with our City Attorney, it is clear that this Executive Order is legally meaningless. The action that Mayor and Council took last Friday will remain in full effect.  Governor Ducey must stop prior...

  Here are some updates on topics recently covered in this blog. No Vax Could Cost You "Unvaccinated individuals have potential to cost the employer more from a health care spend perspective," Symons told CBS MoneyWatch. "They could get COVID and incur expensive hospital costs up to $50,000 for an individual with a tough COVID case." Back in June I blogged a proposal to make people who refuse vaccinations pay their own way if they get COVID-19. It's only fair: If people exercise their freedom to forego the vaccine, they should also be responsible for the consequences of that decision.  As it is they freeride. They can refuse the vaccine for childish and/or political reasons, then depend on those of us who have made the responsible choice to save their bacon with expensive hospital care that everyone pays for through insurance premiums. Incredibly, nobody has rushed to implement my proposal, but insurance providers may be taking a step in that direction. They...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic summary numbers for the week just ended: There are some encouraging signs here, for a change.  Maricopa County cases were up, but only by a fraction.  Statewide new cases were level, and the positive test percentage actually declined.  It's all about Delta in State 48 right now.  Hospital beds increase by about the same percentage as over the last few weeks, so it's encouraging that this number is not spiking along with the cases. Could this mean Arizona's third surge is leveling out?  It's not a good idea to be hasty with conclusions like this but there is at least some reason the be hopeful.  Here is a graph of the 7-day trailing average of cases statewide over the last month and a half (data from ASU dasboard): It sure looks like something changed about a week ago.  Let's hope it holds up! On the vaccination front, more disappointment.  Here's the accelerometer: We did a little better than the last two week,...

  Last month I blogged about Governor Doug Ducey's latest asshatery. It was an executive order banning elementary and secondary schools from requiring masks in their classrooms.  Prior to that he issued an order preventing universities from implementing, basically, any mandatory mitigation measures. His executive orders became law when Republicans attached them to a  budget bill they passed last month. We are finally seeing some major pushback. School districts are unwilling to endanger children in their care as the number of kids hospitalized with COVID-19 doubled in July . Several of them are ignoring the ban and requiring masks for students. Now a group—including the Arizona School Boards Association, Children's Action Alliance, the Arizona Education Association, Arizona Advocacy Network, and a dozen other individuals—is taking things a step further. They have filed a lawsuit against the state. The filing claims that attaching the public illness measures to the bud...

  Last night I was watching Colbert and at one of the breaks the video screen-capped above came on.  It was a big surprise: Cara Christ pitching for vaccinations. In a recent post about Christ's impending retirement as director, I said that as far as I knew the Arizona Department of Health Services wasn't doing much to promote vaccines. Apparently, I didn't know far enough! The public service announcement (PSA) was published just one week ago on the ADHS YouTube channel . It has a fair number of views for something of local relevance and being only a week old (around 45k as I write this). There are about a dozen other PSAs on the site. However, they were all published 3-4 months ago. They have wildly varying numbers of views (low 121, high 931K). Not sure what could account for that.   They are targeting particular groups. Three are in Spanish. Three have black spokespeople. There are celebrities like musician Vaughn Willis, and sports stars Luis Gonzales and T...

  Two figures from the anti-vax community recently died of COVID-19. On one hand, I feel for the friends and families of these people because they needlessly lost a loved-one.   On the other hand, they killed themselves by placing politics above their personal well-being—and that of their friends and loves ones, whom they could have infected. They dug their own graves, so to speak, and are now laying in them. It's hard to see this as anything but just deserts.  The first case is Scott Apley, a member of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee and Dickinson City Council. Two days after making an anti-vax post on Facebook, he was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms and died a couple days later. Apley had previously voiced opposition to mask and vaccination mandates, and publicized a mask-burning event. He also trolled Dr. Leana Wen on Twitter after she tweeted about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, saying "You are an absolute en...

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: Nothing at all to like here. One-week increases in case rates are more then double what they were last week. Given that, it's a little puzzling that the positive test percent is not higher, unless not many tests are being done. The fact that hospital beds are not going up comparably is encouraging. Delta now accounts for more than three-quarters of cases. We have another disappointing, fractional increase in percent fully vaccinated.  Here is the accelerometer: The slow increase has let us slip one notch in the state rankings. It seems people in Arizona have not had sense scared into them like they have in some of the southern states, which are reporting huge increases in the number of people receiving their first dose. Top Image by  Shutterbug75  from  Pixabay

  Yesterday the review site yelp  announced in a blog post that it is adding tools to allow businesses to add their vaccination policies. Information will include whether a business requires its employees to be vaccinated, and whether it will require its customers provide proof of vaccination to be served:   To help consumers understand how a business is currently operating as pandemic guidelines continue to evolve, today, Yelp is announcing two new, free attributes – “Proof of vaccination required” and “All staff fully vaccinated.” Users will be able to filter by these attributes when searching for local businesses on Yelp and will easily see “Proof of vaccination required” indicated on restaurant, food and nightlife businesses in search results. As we know, the Death Cult can't tolerate any behavior that challenges its flimsy ideology. So, we can count on the whackos to try to punish any business that publishes a vaccination policy.   Yelp intends to cover ...

  People are p acking Lake of the Ozarks recreation facilities, and nobody wears masks—after all, Ozark is krazo spelled backwards.  A bartender named Erin said she's been fine so far, so what is there to worry about?  She thinks people are dying from the vaccine (they're not) and says “personally, I feel like my immune system is doing a good job, so why pump it full of something that we don’t really know what it is?” Erin, we really do know what it is, and it has been proven safe now 348 million times (in the U.S.).  Missouri has the fifth worse infection rate in the country, 346 new cases per 100K on a seven-day average, according to the  CDC .  It also has the 12th lowest vaccination rate in the country according to Johns Hopkins .   Some Missourians have decided, wisely, that this is a good reason to go ahead and get vaccinated. The problem is they don't want their friends, neighbors, and family members to find out and harass them.  They...

  I don't know about you, but I've been seeing a lot of coverage about the Delta variant that is confusing and concerning. Do the vaccines protect against it, or not? There is still assurance that the vaccines protect against it, and your chances of getting infected are small. Your chances of getting seriously ill are smaller, and your chances of dying are smaller still.   The data seem pretty unequivocal.  Axios just published a good summary : 164 million Americans have been fully vaccinated in the U.S. as of July 31, 2021 0.077% of those have seen "breakthrough" cases (that's 77 in every 10,000, or about 1 in 130) 0.004% of those have been hospitalized (4 in every 100,000, or 1 in 25,000) 0.001% of those have died (1 in every 100,000) According to my favorite risk-of-dying chart, you're more likely to perish from "electrocution, radiation, extreme temperatures, and pressure" than you are to be hospitalized with a breakthrough infection.  You'r...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic summary numbers for the week just ended: No good news here.  Case rates are increasing, a little more each week.  One quarter of tests are positive.  The Delta variant accounts for almost 3/4 of positive samples sequenced.  COVID-19 hospital beds are up. Vaccinations went up, but by a fraction of a percent.  Here is the accelerator: We continue to get the sawtooth pattern, indicating some choppiness in reporting.  The four-week change is 11.5 percent, meaning we're picking up an average of about 3% a week.  Enough to move us up 1 spot in the state rankings.  I suppose that's something.  OTOH we are still below average. Top Image by  Shutterbug75  from  Pixabay