Corona-zona

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: The only real bright spot this week is a 15% decrease in hospital beds. If that keeps up it may be an indicator that the current wave is starting to level off. Everything else looks bad. Cases are up at the state and Maricopa County levels. Three of five wastewater signals are up, and Tempe has doubled.  Happy Thanksgiving and be careful out there!

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Not much doubt about what is going on here. Five of nine indicators have more than doubled, and all but but two have increased 50%.   Maricopa, Mohave, and Pima counties' wastewater figures are approaching 2022 highs. Maricopa County only has data going back to July, so its 2022 max probably happened last January and is likely greater than what is shown in the table. Looking at the case graph, the rate of increase so far looks comparable to what we saw in the spring. Hopefully we will have a similar low peak this time. And BTW we're now back in the CDC "medium transmission" range again. 

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Well this isn't good. The lull seems to be over. Virtually every number is up, both over a week and over four weeks. The most worrisome is hospital beds, which have been steadily trending up over the last several weeks.  Wastewater signals are all up except Tempe (dashboard is up again) which after going up last week (from 41 to 100) decreased by about 10%. The increases are worrisome because the latest data from ASU's Lim Lab (last updated October 31), where they sequence PCR samples to identify variants, shows that only about 46% of sequences showed BA.5. That is one of the Omicron variants the new bivalent vaccine was designed to protect against.  All the rest of the samples are BA.2.75 (7.7%), which I flagged several weeks ago, and BQ,1.1 (15.4%), and BQ.1 (30.8%), both of which I blogged about a couple weeks ago.  Those, new research confirms , are much mo...

  Not too long ago two studies came out on the new bivalent booster, one from Columbia and one from people at Harvard . Both showed that, in the words of the Columbia authors,  bivalent mRNA vaccine targeting Omicron BA.4/BA.5 and an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain did not induce superior neutralizing antibody responses in humans, at the time period tested, compared to the original monovalent vaccine formulation. At the time experts noted that both of these were based on very small samples. They said let's wait for some more robust findings to come out. Now new results have been jointly released by Pfizer and Moderna. Their study has a larger sample (n = 114) that was stratified to include both 18-55 and over 65 age groups, both of whom got the new bivalent booster. There was also a comparison group of people over 65 who got another dose of the old vaccines.  They measured everyone's antibody levels before, and found them to be the same. Then they looked that the levels one...

  A recent thread on Reddit's r/facepalm list claims that the Premier of Alberta Province in Canada, Danielle Smith, is taking Ivermectin. In the video that accompanies the thread she shows a box among other medications. She is coy about what it is, but it has to be Ivermectin given the things she is saying: It's a prescribed drug, that's all I can tell you. A prescribed drug. And there are some doctors who prescribe certain kinds of drugs. But as you saw the College of Physicians and Surgeons and pharmacists have said they're going to fire any doctor who tries to prescribe anything for treatment of symptoms. So maybe I got the last prescription in Canada that was available. But here I am in the United States taking an illicit drug. Can you believe it? In Canada you can take pretty well whatever you want. Go to a safe injection site an inject yourself with heroin. But you only break the law if you try to take something that will mitigate against blood clots in case you...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: This week again, there are increases in cases and hospital beds. As noted last week, the hospital beds increases are of particular concern because they aren't biased by lack of access to testing and spotty reporting like the case numbers are. Deaths are down a little. That's good and the rate remains low overall. But again those numbers are probably lagging by weeks owing to AzDHS reporting delays and it is a lagging indicator to begin with. Wastewater signals are a mixed bag. There are small increases to moderate decreases. Except for Mohave County, they are not up over four weeks. Once again, Tempe did not report numbers for the most recent period. Hopefully that is temporary and they will resume those next week. Earlier Posts You May Have Missed Roundup: Cable News & Vaccine, Ivermectin Fail, Vaccine Side Effects, Personality Change, Baby-Bump