Corona-zona

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended: As far as infections, things don't look too bad. Maricopa county numbers are down a little. Statewide numbers are up 2.6%. I don't think that's anything to get too excited about because of some recent large reporting anomalies, big enough to pull the 7-day average around, a lot:  If you fit a trendline to the values for October, it still slopes down, albeit not as steeply as we'd hope. As usual, the vaccination numbers are bad. We are barely adding anyone new each week, and we continue to slip in the national rankings, down from 30th to 35th place over the month.   Here is the accelerator. I thought about dropping this graph since it's no longer showing anything new. However, it does show what an abysmal job our public health officials are doing at getting new people vaccinated. We can expect some kind of uptick once the kiddie vaccines arrive.

About two months ago, I blogged about COVIDiots taking ivermectin horse paste for their COVID-19. In that post I noted that there was a clinical trial underway in Brazil to test its effectiveness. The study, called the Together Trial was an international effort to test ivermectin, along with hydroxychloroquine and an antidepressant called fluvoxamine. The implication at the time was that they were seeing good preliminary results for the latter, but not the former two. This week a study published in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that fluvoxamine is indeed effective at preventing hospitalizations. It was a randomized trial with a placebo as the control conducted among people who tested positive for the virus.  Results showed that 11% of the people who got the drug were hospitalized, versus 16% of the people who got the placebo. That's a 5% reduction in absolute risk, and a relative reduction of 32%. Nothing to sneeze at. Fluvoxamine is a cheap drug that is widely avail...

  Merriam-Webster dictionary has added new words to its dictionary, an annual exercise.  This time four of the words are derived from the pandemic and conversation about it. When I first saw the headline for this, I tried to guess what the words would be, and drew a blank. When I saw the list it was a forehead-slapper. Here they are: breakthrough (medical). Infection occurring in someone who is fully vaccinated against an infectious agent — often used before another noun (as in “breakthrough cases” or “breakthrough infection”). super-spreader . An event or location at which a significant number of people contract the same communicable disease — often used before another noun (as in a “super-spreader event”). The term super-spreader originally referred to a highly contagious person capable of passing on a disease to many others, and now can also refer to a single place or occasion where many others are infected. long COVID.  A condition that is marked by the presence of ...

  The avalanche of news about Facebook's misdeeds continues apace. All the stories have a similar form.  One or more employees notice harmful conversations about some topic growing on the platform. They become rightly concerned that if they grow too much there could be harmful social consequences.  They notify their superiors with emails like "surely we're going to do something about this, right?" Their bosses ignore the emails or do next to nothing because doing something could impact the bottom line. This time the same story plays out with regard to vaccine disinformation . Back in March, FB employees noticed that claims that the vaccines are dangerous and ineffective were spreading across the platform.  The reckoned that by adjusting how these posts were ranked by the algorithm, they could curtail their spread. In their place they could promote posts from legit outlets like the CDC and WHO.  Others suggested disabling comments on vaccine-related posts, about ...

  Here are updates on three recent Corona-zona posts for your reading enjoyment. Florida School Walks Back Vaccination Quarantine Policy Last week I blogged about a private school in Miami  that established a policy saying kids must be quarantined for a month after a COVID-19 vaccination. They claimed the policy was a result of careful deliberation even though this apparently included no research on whether COVID-19 vaccines can cause "virus shedding" (they can't). Yesterday there came word that they changed their mind after receiving notification from the Florida Department of Education that their policy was being investigated. Wait, a Florida government agency is actually doing something to promote vaccination and public health?!? Somebody tell DeSantis—he must put a stop to this immediately! Florida Surgeon General Nominee is a Mask-hole Too Last Saturday I blogged about an appointment by Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis of an anti-vaxx doctor to be the ...

  Last week I saw a story about worrisome signs of a resurgence in the UK. Delta is making a comeback there, with cases up 35% over the last two weeks.   Nobody is quite sure why. They have vaccinated 80 percent of the eligible population. They have also had a lot of infections, meaning a huge proportion of the population should have some level of immunity. Yet they look to be on the cusp of yet another surge. This is worrisome for us because there seem to be close parallels between what happens there and what happens here. Check out this comparative chart from the Financial Times , showing cases per 100K in both the US and UK over the course of the pandemic: As you can see, the red UK line has a tendency (not a perfect one to be sure) to lead changes in the US blue line. Does this mean we can look forward to yet another surge? This is one possible explanation for the AZ pandemic numbers I reported yesterday . Cases seem to be going up in Arizona when they should be cont...

  I've been having challenges with the weekly summary for the last couple of weeks. Last week, the AzDHS COVID-19 dashboard , where all the Arizona data ultimately originates, was down for scheduled maintenance. This prevented me getting any meaningful numbers, so there was no update. This week something has gone wrong with the ASU dashboard where I get most of the numbers. I use it because they scrape numbers from the state site but provide historical data and running averages, which are the right numbers to use.  However for some reason, ASU is not updating daily right now. The latest Maricopa County data is from Friday, not yesterday. I had to get yesterday's case numbers from the state site. Another change is that the state is no longer reporting the total number of tests, so there is no way to calculate positive test percentage. That row has been eliminated from the table.    As we learned  not too long ago, maybe this wasn't the best metric anyway. Nonet...

UCLA health policy researcher and physician  Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has appointed a new surgeon general , Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo. He came from California where he was a UCLA health policy researcher and physician. Dr. Lapado is right there with his boss in terms of questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and the value of mandates and other mitigation measures. He complained that people are "being forced to, you know, to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet, no matter what people on TV tell you."  That's a variation of the "I need more time to see if it's safe" excuse routinely used by anti-vaxxers. Can you blame them for having doubts? The vaccines have only been proven safe and effective 6.82 billion times  so far. He also questions whether the vaccines work. "So sure they reduce the likelihood of transmission, and even that is sort of questionable depending on how far out y...

China-linked social media accounts are pushing a new conspiracy theory about COVID-19. See, it didn't originate in Wuhan at all. Instead it just appeared to originate there because it was riding on live lobsters imported from the US!   The disinformation campaign was spotted by a researcher at the University of Oxford who regularly monitors Chinese state media and diplomatic accounts.  A Chinese diplomat in India first tweeted the theory. But it didn't end with the tweet from the diplomat. Investigating further, the researcher found that the claim was flogged by a network of 550 Twitter accounts. They spread the same message at times equivalent to 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. China Standard Time.  Some of the accounts were so-called sock puppets  whose sole purpose is to amplify messages in order to get them promoted by social media platforms' algorithms. The messages were translated into English, Spanish, French, Polish, Korean and even Latin.  Wait...what?...

  The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an In-N-Out Burger in Fisherman's Warf has been shut down by the city. The sanction is because of the shop's refusal to enforce a city requirement to check customers' vaccine cards. The company's attorney called the ordinance “intrusive, improper, and offensive” and an example of government overreach.  He whined further: We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason. It is not surprising that this would happen at In-N-Out. The lawyer's comments about government overreach and "vaccination police" are standard MAGA pandemic boilerplate.  That crowd is (predictably)  up in arms . So much for conservative values about respect for the law. The chain's 2020 political donations includ...

  Are you one of the millions of people who take daily doses of a statin drug to lower cholesterol? If so you appear to have a small edge in the battle against COVID-19. A study recently published in PLOS Medicine looked at 963,876 people in Sweden. Over the study period some died of COVID-19 and some didn't.  Because Sweden has socialized medicine, the researchers were able to determine whether or not people in the study were using statins to lower cholesterol. They and compared each group in terms of COVID-19 mortality. The results indicate that that there is a statistically significant (i.e. non-random) effect. "Statin treatment was associated with a moderately lower risk of COVID-19 mortality," the authors concluded.  They stress that this was an observational study and not an experiment, meaning it shows an association but doesn't demonstrate cause. That's a standard caveat (limitation) for a study like this, but it's hard to imagine how the cause could ...

  Most posts about Florida on this blog are about the dumb things their governor regularly does. But today, there is a new example of Florida COVIDiocy, this time from a school. Center Academy, a private school in Florida, has enacted a policy saying that students who get vaccinated must quarantine for 30 days afterward. Google has several listings for Center Academy in Florida, and the news story doesn't single out one. So I assume the policy applies to all of them. The policy says kids have the be quarantined after each shot. They are urging parents not to get their kids vaccinated until next summer so they won't have to miss two months of school under this policy.  The school said the "policy was enacted as a prudent precautionary measure after much thoughtful deliberation." One wonders how thoughtful the deliberation could have been, given that the vaccines neither contain nor produce any virus that can be spread.  Had their thoughtful deliberation included look...

  There will be no Arizona pandemic numbers summary this week due to scheduled maintenance on the AzDHS website that serves the data. It looks like patterns from the previous week are more or less holding. Image by  Clker-Free-Vector-Images  from  Pixabay  

  Some anti-vaxxers are (finally) facing significant consequences of their actions. To date the most they have faced—if anything—is the inconvenience of being unable to attend some event or go inside some establishment. Now those who need transplants are being told they can't receive them unless they have been vaccinated. The American Society of Transplantation and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation released a joint statement saying that transplant patients, as well as their donors, families, and immediate contacts should be vaccinated. The reason is that transplant patients must take immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection of their transplants. This makes them more susceptible to COVID-19. It also suppresses their immune response to a post-transplant vaccination, making a before-the-fact vaccination the best hope for prevention. Needless to say, anti-vaxxers getting kicked off transplant lists take a dim view of this requirement. One woman in Color...

  Earlier this month the CDC released a study on the effectiveness of mask requirements in schools in preventing the spread of COVID-19. It was conducted by researchers from ASU, the CSC, Maricopa and Pima counties, and the Arizona Department of Education. (Where is AzDHS?) The researchers compared schools with "early mask requirements"—i.e., in place before school started—to those with "late mask requirements" (instituted after school started) to those with no mask requirements.  Usable data were collected from 999 of 1,041 (96.0%) of K–12 public non-charter schools in Maricopa and Pima counties. The results show that—guess what—masks work. Here is a chart derived from numbers presented in a main results table in the study: In other words, schools without mask mandates were three times more likely to have an our break as schools with mask mandates. Actually the figure is a little higher. Quoting the CDC report: "After adjusting for potential described confoun...

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: Last week I was worried that our turnaround was fizzling out. This week the case numbers are coming down nicely, especially in Maricopa County. Positive test percentage is flat, and hospital beds are only up slightly. Here is the curve for the seven-day average of new cases statewide: It is going downhill again, which is great news. With any luck, by the end of the month we'll be back down to June levels. Here is the vaccination accelerometer: This is starting to sound like a broken record. We are going nowhere, notwithstanding whatever efforts our $400/hr vaccination czar  is making.   Since it's only been three weeks since his appointment, I'll give him another week or so. But I'm this close to calling our vax program dead and his appointment a boondoggle.

  You may recall that this summer Arizona Governor Doug Ducey tried to take federal money intended for COVID-19 relief and spend it on tax cuts for the wealthy. Because of course he did. That's the way he rolls. The feds said no . The Arizona Attorney General sued, because ensuring that money is spent for the purpose intended by Congress is somehow unconstitutional. Naturally,  he lost .   A responsible leader would take that as a sign and spend money within guidelines. But not Ducey!  He hatched a new plan to misspend relief money. He would distribute it to schools only if they complied with his public illness orders  by not requiring students to wear masks. There was a separate plan to give families $7000 each to move their kids from schools that require masks to ones that don't. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what public health considerations—not to mention common sense—say he should have done. Now the Treasury Department has been forced to ...

  TikTok user Linda McAffee posted a brief video of her COVID-19 Halloween display. It's brilliant.  She has plastic skeletons holding signs that say "I refuse to live afraid," "I don't know what's in it," "personal freedum," "bathed in the blood," (with Christian symbols), "government conspiracy" (with pictures of sheep), and my personal fave "I did my own research" (with social media icons). It has 391K likes and 74K shares. Comments include those from people who say they intend to steal the idea. A similar display went up in  North Carolina . It features a 13 foot skeleton with a sign "Not vaccinated, see you soon, idiots!"  There is also a tombstone with signs "I listened to T****" and "I got my news from Fox." A guy in a Chicago suburb erected a display  with tombstones carrying messages like “Proudly anti-vax,” “I’d rather die than comply,” “Ivermectin believer,” “Yes, honey, I ...

 I have become aware of a couple of websites that are cataloging anti-vaxxers who are victims of COVID-19. Some of the people are sick, others have died. The first site is sorryantivaxxer.com , a blog. It describes itself and its purpose thus:  The purpose of this site is educational,  everyone listed on this site was/is an anti-vaxxer activist who helped spread COVID-19 misinformation on social media. Share to stop others from making the same mistake. GET VACCINATED!  As of this writing, it lists 171 cases. For each one, the author provides a picture of the person in question, summarizes their anti-vaxxer bona fides , and provides a link to a story where that information was obtained.  The blog posts allow comments. Some of these provide additional information and quotes from the victim and leave it at that.  Others are sometimes snarky, as we should expect. The second site is a subreddit called HermanCainAward .  Herman Cain, you may remember, was a ...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic summary numbers for the week just ended: In a reversal from the last few weeks, numbers are heading up again, albeit modestly except in Maricopa County. I was thinking we were on our way back down to June levels. Maybe we are and this is just a blip but I don't like seeing the return of those red numbers.  Hospital beds are still decreasing, but those lag infections. Here is what the statewide new case trend looks like this week.  It suggests a plateau and new increases too:  We have more anemic vaccination increase this week: More evidence that our $450/hour consultant isn't doing much besides collecting his paycheck.