Corona-zona

  The ASPR/HHS Test to Treat program is now running in Arizona (Hat Tip u/OverPalpitation4845 on Reddit). At participating locations you can be tested for COVID-19 and if positive walk away with a course of treatment for Paxlovid anti-viral medication. To find a location near you, click here and enter your zip code.  My zip code had 176 locations within a 10 mile radius. You get two kinds of results: Places with test-to-treat programs, and places that can fill Paxlovid prescriptions if you have one from your physician. I looked at some of the locations in less densely populated areas of Arizona. They have few to none of the test-to-treat, but enough of the fill-prescription sites. I guess if you live those areas you need to see your physician to get a prescription. Paxlovid is said to be extremely effective in preventing severe disease. The only problems I have heard about with it are a sometimes nasty taste in your mouth, and a tendency of about two percent of users to hav...

Yesterday's New York Times had a  story about people circumventing U.S. restrictions on testing for people traveling home from abroad. They are exploiting a loophole in the laws that requires tests for people entering the country by air but not by land.  So people who go abroad and test positive change their flights to arrive in Canada or Mexico then drive across the border. Because they have, y'know, shit to do ! One woman at least gave some consideration to her state of health and whether she might be infectious, but ultimately said she didn't follow the rules because she thought they were dumb: I had zero symptoms, no fever, nothing. I felt fine and when you’re stateside, the C.D.C. says you can end isolation five days after testing positive, so the same rules should apply when I’m traveling. It makes no sense that I can go to a wedding five days after a positive test in Miami, but if I catch the virus when I’m on vacation I can’t fly home. That should be illegal. She ...

Wow, I don't know about you, but lots and lots of my friends & acquaintances have been getting infected this spring. To a person these folks are fully vaxxed and boosted and they have respect for the virus—i.e., they are not COVIDiots who take risks with it. I work with a number of people who are in their late 20s to early 30s. Since January something like half of them have tested positive. Senior Southeast Asia Correspondent PBR and his family of three have gotten it twice. Once was during international travel and this delayed their ability to return home because of strict quarantine regulations in Singapore. I know another family who had two kids under 5 years old back in January, and the whole household got infected. They now have three kids under 5 and had to cancel a planned Memorial Day party because they all got infected again. Then a friend who is 75 attended a wedding where all those in attendance were supposed to have been vaccinated and boosted. He came down with a m...

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Just a couple of notes about the table. First, I have changed the one and four week absolute change values to percent increase/decrease. So for Maricopa County cases, the rate has increased by 8.9 from last week. If we divide by last week's rate and multiply by 100, we see that is a 52.1% increase. To me this is a little more meaningful than the raw number. Second, Sonora Quest has not updated its dashboard since I reported the values last week so I have not current or change values for that.  For what it's worth, Maricopa country reports  19% positivity, about the same as the last Sonora Quest report. Cases, deaths, and hospitalizations are all up. But those are lagging indicators, probably the result of what has happened over the last few weeks. The possibly good news is that (as just mentioned) positive tests may be stabilizing. Also wastewater signals have decrease...

  The CDC has not done the best job of communicating its pandemic advice, frequently changing its mind. Who can forget in 2020 when they said we did not need to wear masks, only to change course and say we did need to wear them after all? In April 2021 they said vaccinated people should wear masks indoors, then two weeks later changed and said they didn't have to, then a month later changed and said they did. To be fair, they are working in a high-uncertainty environment. They don't call it the "novel" coronavirus for nothing. Now we have another change on the second vaccine booster. Up until now they've said it's only recommended for people over 65 or with underlying conditions.  This week that changed that to say people 50 and over should definitely get their second booster. The stated reasons for the change are a recent increase in cases and a “a steep and substantial increase in hospitalizations for older Americans.”  I know all kinds of people who have ...

  Last fall, I blogged about a discovery that deer were getting COVID-19 and spreading it among each other. This  story  from Monday (HT u/AhavaKhatool on Reddit) says that Arizona officials are testing zoo animals and wildlife for COVID-19.   [Aside: In the original post I wondered how deer could catch a virus from humans because deer are, y'know, not known for cuddling up to us. I've since read that they can get it from discarded food, or from captive deer that have closer contact with humans.] That news article is very brief. It talks about the wide range of animals being tested and claims they have not yet found any cases. Unfortunately, it doesn't say how many animals are being tested or what the sampling strategy is. I find it hard to believe they haven't found any yet and this makes me suspect they're not taking enough samples. Why? In this interview , scientists at Penn State said they were "gobsmacked" when 1200 of 2000 deer they tested in Pe...

Ugh, COVID-19 On Indefinite Repeat?   Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: A combination of wishful thinking and the desire to avoid being alarmist have so far kept me from saying we're in a fourth wave. But if it walks like a duck... This is the third week in a row we've seen week-over-week increases in cases and in the early warning indicators (positive tests and wastewater). Things I'm not happy to see are that, relative to the previous week's values:  Maricopa county cases have increased by 36% Statewide cases have increased by 31% Pima wastewater has increased 26% Yavapai wastewater has increased 94% and has set a new 2022 record Tempe wastewater is up a whopping 209%. Positive tests are only up a little, but up nonetheless. Public health officials caution that so many people are relying on home tests that are not reported, cases counts are significantly underestimated.  This could affect pos...

  For today's bite-sized post here's a cheerful thought: What if you could get COVID-19 not once, or not twice, but over and over again—even several times in the same year? That's the depressing prospect that is being considered now, according to an article in the New York Times . The problem is that the virus is continuing to mutate, and is currently doing so from a base of the Omicron variant, which was good at evading antibodies from vaccinations and previous infections to begin with. As it continues to spin off new sub-variants, these can be expected to evolve in the direction of acq uiring mutations that make it  more contagious and/or even better at evading immune responses. Juliet Pulliam, an epidemiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa was quoted in the article as saying It seems likely to me that that’s going to sort of be a long-term pattern. The virus is going to keep evolving and there are probably going to be a lot of people getting many, many rei...

The other day I ran across this article commemorating the dubious milestone of one million U.S. deaths from the pandemic. A table in the article lists the "preventable deaths per million adults" for each state. I counted down to the Arizona slot, finding us 36th places down from the best. Wait a minute, I thought, isn't that the same ranking Arizona had among states for percent fully vaccinated the last time I calculated it? Why yes, yes it is . Is that a coincidence, or do these preventable death numbers line-up with vaccination percentages for all the states? To find out, I took the vaccination percentages on April 13th (data from JHU Dashboard  with Arizona rate corrected) and plotted those against the preventable deaths numbers in the above article: That, dear readers, is a very strong correlation (the outlier case on the right is DC). Like, you rarely see correlations that large for anything involving human behavior. The percent vaccinated accounts for about two-th...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Everything is trending up except deaths and hospital beds. I expect those won't be too far behind. Also now there are increases over four weeks as well as over one week.  Though again—for context—we are not seeing values for anything as high as the worst this year, we are seeing upward trends now for three weeks, and the weekly change is increasing. This is almost identical  to what things looked like at the end of June and beginning of July last year when the Delta wave was cranking up. If this is a new wave, which it is starting to look like, we could be in for trouble. The Arizona health emergency declaration is cancelled. AzDHS has stopped reporting hospitalizations and is only reporting cases once a week. Federal pandemic money has dried up amid partisan squabbling , which means (among other things) no more free testing. Almost nobody is wearing masks anymo...

  A couple weeks ago, I blogged about some pro-pandemic laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor. They were "do overs" of the legislature's failed attempt to attach similar measures banning mask and vaccine mandates to a budget bill last year. Last Friday (classic timing to limit news coverage) the governor signed another bill tying the hands of his successors (but not himself!) with respect to pandemic emergencies. This one would limit the duration of an emergency to 120 days unless extended by the legislature. That doesn't sound so bad, I suppose. They could have passed a law—which Ducey would probably have also rubber-stamped—prohibiting future governors from declaring any public health emergencies.  But you've got to wonder what these politicians are thinking by passing this and the previous measures. They amount to constraints on what the government can do to combat a disease outbreak.  These measures are reactions to the current emergency...

  Back in November, I blogged about new antiviral treatments that could nip a COVID-19 infection in the bud. The best one was Paxlovid, produced by Pfizer, and it reduced the chances of hospitalization by 89%. The big question mark at that time was how fast the drug company would be able to ramp-up production. In January Pfizer agreed to produce 10 million courses of treatment for the U.S. government. It is a key part of a test-to-treat initiative where people testing positive at a clinic or pharmacy would be immediately given a pack of the pills. Since then there have been a few bumps in the road. First, just a couple weeks ago there were reports that pharmacies were struggling to use available supplies because of confusion about who was eligible to receive the treatment. That problem seems to have been resolved with more recent reports that prescriptions are up. A second issue is " Paxlovid mouth " a type of  dysgeusia . It doesn't happen to everyone, but when it d...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: This is not the data I was hoping to see today. Almost everything is up. Cases are up statewide, ending a three-week flat spot in the case graph. Cases have increased 25% in Maricopa County. Positive test percent is up, as is the wastewater signal in Pima County and Tempe (and again those values are lagged, from a week ago).  Deaths are up but those are lagging indicators that might be due to infections quite some time ago. Hospital beds are still flat, but those are lagging indicators too. The one bright spot is that Yavapai wastewater is down after a big spike over the last couple of weeks. Last week, there was no indication that the wastewater values corresponded to a lot of new cases.  Today the Yavapai County shows 25 new cases from May 3 to May 4, which is a different story. Unfortunately they don't provide historical numbers it's hard to tell if that's an...

  A recent piece in The Atlantic suggests we could be in the middle of an "invisible" wave . It puts me in mind of the tree-fall-in-the-forest conundrum.   In the U.S. our case surveillance systems have always been crappy because they rely on self-selected participation rather than random sampling. The two approaches can give very different pictures of infection rates.  Worse, now we are not even getting an accurate count of the self-selected tests. This is for two reasons . First, people are having milder cases and they may not even recognize they have COVID-19, or may not be seeing physicians if they do.  Second, people have ready access to in-home antigen tests. I have noted before that those are of questionable accuracy , especially for asymptomatic infections. So people could have a false negative test and go about their business unknowingly spreading the disease.   But even if they get a positive test there is (as far as I know) no way to repor...