AZ Pandemic Numbers for the Week Ending July 31

 

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


Popular posts from this blog

Another One Bites the Dust

Image
Hi all. Stepping out of retirement for a moment to say that the day has finally arrived. After four years of successfully avoiding COVID-19 infection I had a positive test yesterday. Symptoms are very mild—I've had worse colds. The provider at urgent care said almost all the cases they are seeing are the same. Mild symptoms may also be due to the fact that I had the original vaccine then the two boosters. All this time I thought I might be a NOVID —one of those people who never get the bug. But no, it must have been my assiduous mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk situations when things were bad. So here's double middle fingers to all the kooks who think masks don't work (I've not been wearing masks for months now). I don't know what variant I have but it's likely JN.1. It is said to be extraordinarily contagious and accounts for 60% of cases worldwide . It also tends to produce mild infections like the one I have.  This article claims that right now every...
Read more

Anti-Vax Group Promotes Public Illness Via Legal Bullying

Image
  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....
Read more

Preprint Study: Omicron Is Just as Pathogenic But Not As Deadly Because of Other Factors

Image
In an earlier blog , I summarized some information on why so many vaxxed people were getting infected and what immunity was doing to those at-home antigen texts.  In that post I said: "Omicron cousins are less likely to cause severe disease, even if they are more contagious." In response to that @SuziSuperKitn on Twitter sent me this link to a Reuters article about a month ago, that reported on a preprint study looking at the question of whether Omicron in its various flavors is really less pathogenic. Note that this is a preprint, which means it has still not been reviewed. It is not unusual for the peer review process to turn-up issues with the study methodology that invalidate the study or require modifications. But this one includes authors from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Med School. Such researchers don't usually do shoddy studies so it's a good bet it does not have fatal flaws. What they found, in a nutshell, is that if you just compare mortali...
Read more