Corona-zona

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* This is the last of these Sunday reports I will be able to do because AzDHS has cut its reporting interval from daily to weekly. I will keep doing these summaries, but obviously I won't be able to include any of the graphs that are based on daily data. Also they will be reporting data on Wednesday and I will do the same. One consequence already this week is that they did not publish hospital bed numbers for yesterday because they stopped daily reporting yesterday and hospital numbers are always a day late. So I imputed yesterday's value by subtracting from Friday's value the average daily decrease over the last week. Anyway, the table looks really good. Case rates continue to plunge and from the graph you can see that they are continuing to fall below Delta levels last autumn.   The big surprise in the table is the 7.1% increase in fully vaxxed people, mo...

 It's not very often that I get to post good news on this blog, but today is one of the times. New research says that if you're double-vaxxed and boosted, you're good—probably for a long time, and probably against a wide variety of current and potential future variants. It has been known for some time that levels of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 wane in the months following the second vaccine dose. Protection may decrease substantially, in one study  dropping from 90+% to 70%. This is why last fall the CDC authorized booster shots for anybody who wanted one. Recent studies have come out (one published here , another one in pre-print  so not yet reviewed) showing that vaxxed and boosted people's immune systems are primed for recognizing all kinds of SARS spike proteins and targeting them if provoked. The effect isn't from antibodies per se, which wane like they always have. But our immune systems have "memory" cells that can recognize an infection and trig...

  Just when you think people can't get any crazier, there's this. Mask-hole parents are bombarding schools with fake notices of claim, threatening to file them against their surety bonds if the schools don't do what they want. This includes ending masking policies and various other things. They're being egged-on by a website and Telegram group called "Bonds for the Win." The website is run by this fruitcake woman in Scottsdale named Miki Klann who thinks the Earth is flat and that AIDS is a hoax. Here is an example of one of their documents served in Michigan. It lists 15 violations of state, federal, and international law—including the Nuremberg code, naturally—that the school has supposedly committed. All legal experts agree that these claims are 100% bullshit. This type of bond fraud   is a form of paper terrorism and was innovated by the sovereign citizens movement . They flooded courts with invalid pseudo-legal documents claiming they are not subject t...

  The Arizona Department of Health Services (AzDHS) plans to change the frequency with which it reports COVID-19 statistics. Their statement about the changes is here . The statement says, in part: Starting in March, the frequency of reporting reflected on the ADHS COVID-19 Data Dashboard will shift to weekly. As a result, data on the dashboard will update each Wednesday starting March 2. Saturday, Feb. 26, will have the last daily update. On one level it makes some sense to go to less frequent reporting. One thing I have  complained about  before is media taking a high daily number of infections and sensationalizing it, when they know or should know that cases can get backed up in the system causing outlier numbers.  Going to a weekly report would address that. But then, so would a daily report of the seven-day trailing average. They say they are making the change because infection rates are dropping, all the cool kids (34 other states, they claim) are doing it, and...

   Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* This week everything is going in the right direction, even deaths for the first time in a long time. The only red numbers are from deaths over the last month and Arizona rank among states in vaccinations. The deaths aren't surprising since as noted before those lag infections. The rank has been dithering for some time now. One slightly discouraging thing is that the decrease in cases seems to be bottoming-out. Both state and county rates declined by 28 over the last week, but the previous week they declined by over 60, and the week before that by around 90.  The new cases graph seems to be leveling off too. Hopefully it will continue moving downward. We are still at a little more than double the case rate of last spring. The decline in new hospital beds may be leveling off too, according to the dual-axis graph. As with last week, decline in news deaths is ...

The other day I ran across this opinion piece in The Guardian . In it a Columbia sociologist tries to explain why it's perfectly understandable that people would resist vaccinations against COVID-19. He repeatedly refers to "Left-leaning people" and "progressives," and practices whataboutism with respect to T****'s mishandling of the pandemic. So he has a right-wing agenda.  Another thing that makes me think that is the tone of the piece, which is condescending and smarty-pants.  He gives 13 reasons in all why people might reasonably resist vaccines. I won't go through these one by one, but rather address three categories into which they fall.   Several points focus on the novelty and speed of production of the vaccines. Several more focus on side-effects of the vaccines. While these might have been reasonable concerns a year ago, today they are nothing short of ridiculous.  Bloomberg estimates that more then 10.4 billion doses of the vaccines have be...

  Almost a year ago I blogged about the governors failing a marshmallow test  by rushing to end pandemic restrictions.  It was a reference to a famous study  done Stanford about self-control in kids. Basically it looked at kids' ability to forego a small immediate reward for a double reward after a delay. For context, at that time we were coming off a third wave of the virus (graph via Google/NYT): For the most part it was the usual-suspect COVIDiot governors in places like Texas, Mississippi, and Arizona who took this as a green light to end all pandemic restrictions. But there were other liberal states like Massachusetts who did the same (maybe other places too). I compared this to failing the marshmallow test because public health officials were saying it was too soon . As you probably remember and can see from the graph, they were right. Later that year we encountered a new Delta wave, followed by an Omicron wave. Now history is repeating itself. Republicans are ...

 Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* Last week I speculated that we might be back to Fall 2021 levels by now. We are almost there, but the seven-day average departed from a linear decrease and began to tail-out this week, which it totally predictable.  It looks like another week should do it. The only question is whether we will continue to decline below levels from the fall, which would be awesome.  All the metrics except deaths continue to show steep declines. Again we see the same in the dual axis graphs for deaths and hospital beds. Deaths continue to lag cases, as is expected. Hospitals continue to see relief: One odd thing is that we continue climbing in the ranks of states' vaccinated percentage. We've been  averaging an increase of of about a half-percent a week since August. This means we're continuing to bang-out small increases whereas the states we are passing are not.  I...

A recent study has concluded that lockdowns don't work. It is being bandied-about by conservative media as proof that other pandemic mitigation measures like masks don't work either. The study  is a meta-analysis, which statistically combines the results of other, smaller studies to gain  power to detect differences. It was done by some some economists—not epidemiologists.  It was published in a journal that is not peer-reviewed and was founded by a coauthor of the paper. That guy also happens to be a fellow at the arch-conservative Cato Institute. Talk about motivated reasoning. Public health experts criticized the study , saying it used an squishy definition of lockdowns. It also did not properly account for complex disease processes such as the wide variation in time it takes for infected people to die. Despite this, Rand Paul wasted no time taking the study at face value, claiming that lockdowns do more harm than good. He also said that masks don't work. Wait...wasn...

Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* You know, it can get pretty depressing doing these summaries when things are going South. Every week things get worse and the only question is how bad they are going to get. Then there are weeks like this one when things are turning around and everything is getting better. The new case numbers are showing big decreases both in Maricopa County and statewide. Last week I noticed that the county numbers were falling at a pretty much linear rate, so I calculated the slope (about -13 new cases per 100K per day, 7-day average). I applied that to the Feb 1 numbers, predicting how long it would take to get back to December infection levels. It has proved pretty accurate, even slightly conservative:   Unless something happens to change the line, by this time next week we should be back down to under 40 new cases per day. That's about where we were in November and early Dec...

  Legislators in the Arizona House are pushing a law that would punish businesses that fire workers for refusing vaccine mandates. The bill is only 16 lines long, and the main part says: Notwithstanding any other law, an employee who is terminated for not receiving a covid-19 vaccine as a condition of employment shall receive either of the following: (1) Severance compensation paid by an employer in the amount of the employee's annual salary in one lump sum or installment payments over twelve months. (2) Reemployment with the employer at the same or similar position held on the date the employee was terminated and a reasonable accommodation provided by the employer to the employee. So basically if you require your employees to be vaccinated and they refuse, then if you fire them you have to pay them one year's salary as severance. The bill is retroactive to last November. This is obviously an anti-vax measure. I suppose they think it's necessary because the governor's ...

  You have probably heard of American exceptionalism , the idea that here in 'Merica we are different from and better than other countries. Many people question  whether that is true. I don't want to wade into that debate, but it is true in at least one ignoble sense: We die of COVID-19 better than any other industrialized country, according to data just published by the New York Times . I can't tell the exact numbers because their graphs are not interactive and the axes aren't well done. But eyeballing their graphs we edge-out Belgium for the number one spot in cumulative deaths per 100K. We appear to be around 150% higher than Canada.  We look to be more than 2x higher than Japan despite the shitshow that was their vaccine rollout. On deaths from the Omicron wave no other country even comes close. Why? One reason is poor vaccine uptake, according to NYT's graphs. We are well below all the other industrialized countries in share of population fully vaccinated, an...

  Here are some updates on previous Corona-zona posts. COVID Dick is Real In July of last year, I blogged about a reason males should be afraid of COVID-19: Erectile dysfunction. At that time the reports were anecdotal. Not anymore. This report from Gizmodo covers all the latest research, and the short story is that it's real. Not only can in infection impair one's ability to get it up even after recovery, it can also shrink your member. Yikes! Also there have been reports of sexual dysfunction in women. Disappointing Arizona Booster Uptake That update makes it even more puzzling that booster shot update in Arizona is so low.  Back in December, I reckoned that only about 11% of Arizona residents had gotten their booster shot (depending on what you used as the divisor). Now AzDHS is reporting actual numbers and they are not much better. Only 37% of eligible people have gotten their third jab. Why would you get two shots then skip the third?! Urine Drinker Lives by His Own R...