Corona-zona

As of last Friday, Johns Hopkins University pulled the plug on its popular Coronavirus Resource Center . The site ran for just over three years, and was an interdisciplinary collaboration between JHU's Applied Physics Laboratory, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Medicine, Sheridan Libraries, and the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence. The World Economic Forum called the site "One of the most vital and trusted resources in the fight against the spread of COVID-19." Astonishingly, it was viewed more than  2.5 billion times . This blog accounted for a few of those visits, and you'll find it linked several times in previous posts. It was an important resource for my reporting. They are closing the site because vaccines have reduced the risk of death, and because reliable public health data was becoming increasingly hard to get at the global scale the dashboa...

  The other day, a notification popped-up on my phone asking if I wanted to install this app called Covid Watch Arizona. Naturally, I accepted. This technology has been around for some time. Similar system are in place in (at least) Virginia and New York.   With this app (available from the  Play Store  or the  App Store ) your phone has anonymous Bluetooth conversations with other phones nearby so it knows what phones it has been near. When the owner of one of those phones reports an infection, others who were near it are notified. This does not involve any central repository of what phones were near other phones. Your phone keeps the list of anonymous ID numbers of the phones it was near and only alerts you when it receives word that one of those IDs has an infected owner.  It's not totally clear to me who is behind the development and deployment of the app in Arizona. As you can see from the screenshot above, it is listed as belonging to AzDHS. But ...

  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 ...

  Last night I was watching Colbert and at one of the breaks the video screen-capped above came on.  It was a big surprise: Cara Christ pitching for vaccinations. In a recent post about Christ's impending retirement as director, I said that as far as I knew the Arizona Department of Health Services wasn't doing much to promote vaccines. Apparently, I didn't know far enough! The public service announcement (PSA) was published just one week ago on the ADHS YouTube channel . It has a fair number of views for something of local relevance and being only a week old (around 45k as I write this). There are about a dozen other PSAs on the site. However, they were all published 3-4 months ago. They have wildly varying numbers of views (low 121, high 931K). Not sure what could account for that.   They are targeting particular groups. Three are in Spanish. Three have black spokespeople. There are celebrities like musician Vaughn Willis, and sports stars Luis Gonzales and T...

  I don't know about you, but I've been seeing a lot of coverage about the Delta variant that is confusing and concerning. Do the vaccines protect against it, or not? There is still assurance that the vaccines protect against it, and your chances of getting infected are small. Your chances of getting seriously ill are smaller, and your chances of dying are smaller still.   The data seem pretty unequivocal.  Axios just published a good summary : 164 million Americans have been fully vaccinated in the U.S. as of July 31, 2021 0.077% of those have seen "breakthrough" cases (that's 77 in every 10,000, or about 1 in 130) 0.004% of those have been hospitalized (4 in every 100,000, or 1 in 25,000) 0.001% of those have died (1 in every 100,000) According to my favorite risk-of-dying chart, you're more likely to perish from "electrocution, radiation, extreme temperatures, and pressure" than you are to be hospitalized with a breakthrough infection.  You'r...

  Every Sunday, Corona-zona posts a weekly summary of pandemic numbers, including the percent vaccinated. So I have been consulting the JHU dashboard every week for months now to get the latest number of doses and number fully vaccinated. There was a time, I think back in early March, where Arizona rated in the top ten (or so) states for percentage vaccinated (I can't find the exact number because there is no historical data). I was stunned. Arizona is never in the top ten states in any list .   We're 30th in livability , 31st in health , 46th in education , and 34th in quality of life . Even in an area where I thought we would "excel"— gun ownership —we are in the middle of the pack at 24th (46.3% of Arizonans have guns at home). Here is a look a the weekly fully-vaccinated numbers since January: From January to late March, you can see that there is an upward curve to the line, meaning every week we were increasing more than the previous week.  But then starting in...

  The CDC and its director Rochelle Walensky are taking a lot of flack over their announcement last week that vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks in most settings. This is something everyone has been wanting, so why the uproar? Just a couple of days before the announcement, Walensky was defending CDCs mask policies at a Senate hearing. She got an earful from Sen. Susan Collins, who said "I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don't anymore." She continued: So, here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission, and unworkable restrictions on summer camps. Why does this matter? It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendation, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.  Ouch.  So you would think Collins and people like her would be overjoyed when the mask guidance changed. Perhaps she was, but others, not s...

  A just-released study in PLOS One by mathematicians at Cambridge took a look at who was best at predicting pandemic numbers back at the start. For me it's one of those "why didn't I think of that" studies. One year ago, the researchers surveyed three groups of people in the UK to make predictions about the pandemic. The groups were 140  experts (epidemiologists, statisticians, mathematical modelers, virologists, and clinicians), and 2086 laypersons. They laypersons were divided into high-numeracy non-experts (good with numbers) non-experts,  based on a test they administered as part of the survey. They asked each group to predict how many deaths and infections there would be by December 2020.  They asked them to make these predictions both as total numbers and as a rate per 1000 people. Here is a chart I made based on their Table 1.  It shows the total numbers predicted for each of the three groups, as well as the actual number in December:  Please no...

  One day after the terrible massage parlor shootings  earlier last week, a study appeared in the American Journal of Public Health. It links the former president's use of the phrase "Chinese Virus" in a tweet to an uptick in the #chinesevirus hashtag on Twitter.  The paper must have been under review and in production for quote some time. It's quite the coincidence that its publication coincided with the shootings of multiple Asians. The implication is that T****'s rhetoric contributed to a recent surge in anti-Asian racism. To be perfectly clear, I think he is a racist and that his rhetoric no doubt is a contributor. But we have to be careful not to over-interpret the results. The study compared tweets containing the neutral hashtag #covid19 to those containing the racist hashtag #chinesevirus. Comparing the week before T****'s March 16 tweet to the week after, they found a large increase in the number of tweets with the latter compared to the former, and a...

  As noted in an earlier post , right now it's the wild west out there when it comes to masks. It seems they are hyped based on everything except how well they work filtering virus-size particles.   Now, the  American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has come to the rescue with a new set of standards for "barrier face coverings," known to most of us commoners as masks. If you follow that link you will be required—for reasons unclear to me—to go through a registration process that includes providing your address and phone number and verifying your email before you can see the standards.  I registered and got the document so you don't have to. There are basically three important parts to the standard, requirements for design, testing, and labeling.  Design Requirements Masks must cover the nose and mouth.  They can't have valves or other things that allow unfiltered breath to escape. They have to say if they're one-size-fits-all or sized for d...

In an earlier post , I noted that American Indian communities, particularly those on reservations, have been getting hammered by the pandemic. I suggested that this may be one reason why Arizona's numbers have looked so bad compared to other mountain west states like Colorado. Here is a graph from the ASU Biodesign dashboard comparing new cases per 100K people, 7-day moving average, for Navajo and Apache counties (green and blue lines, respectively, with large reservation populations) with Maricopa county (maroon line, holding 60% of the state's population): At most time points the Apache and Navajo have higher rates than Maricopa, sometimes by a lot.   For fatalities the situation is even worse. The Guardian recently ran a story on how the pandemic is decimating American Indian and Alaskan Native communities. They have an interactive chart showing that, in Arizona, American Indians die at more than twice the rate per 100K people as do the next highest groups (whites, and La...

  For years now Russia has been running Soviet-style dysinformatzia campaigns on people in the West, especially the United States. During the 2016 election, they promoted ads on Facebook designed to inflame both sides of just about any controversial issue, just to get us good and pissed off. Now they're doing a similar thing with vaccines. The New York Times ran a story  yesterday exposing a propaganda operation by Russia to spread negative disinformation about vaccines produced in the West, and promote a positive image of their Sputnik 5 vaccine.  The efforts target Central and South American countries, particularly Mexico and Brazil, which are only now ramping-up vaccine purchases for their populations. “Every negative story or issue that has come out about a U.S.-made vaccine is amplified, while they flood the zone with any positive report about the Russian vaccine,” said a researcher quoted in the story.  They are supporting these efforts with social media posts...

While researching a post from yesterday, I had the great misfortune of calling the ADHS COVID-19 "Hotline" at 844-542-8201. I was trying to ask if there is a residency requirement in Arizona for getting the vaccine.  The experience left my head spinning and my blood pressure elevated.  I would like to think this system was not designed to frustrate callers to the point of giving up, but it sure seems that way. Whether it was or not, the overall message it sends it is: Hang up and go away! What Happens When you call you are treated to many announcements about how there are no appointments available, what to do if you're 75 or older and having trouble getting vaccinated, links where you can go on the web to find out this or that.  All this information is repeated.   Next comes a bunch of announcements about what information you cannot get on this line, which is substantial.  No information about test results or appointments or information about availa...

The phrase "herd immunity" pops-up regularly in public discussion of COVID-19.  The idea is that if enough people get infected, recover, and become immune (or get immunity through vaccination), the pandemic will end because the virus will have nowhere left to spread.   There was a huge argument—sorry, row —in the UK last spring when officials implied they might protect old people and let nature take its course with everybody else. Sweden flirted with the strategy by foregoing lockdowns, but has seen  no benefit .  Letting people get sick is just dumb.  Right now in Arizona there is about a 7% chance that if someone gets infected they will wind up in the hospital.  The do-nothing strategy is based on the incorrect notion  that only old people can be harmed by COVID-19. According to a paper by David Jones and Stefan Helmreich in The Lancet , the phrase "herd immunity" has its origins in the early 1900s.  It was used by livestock veterinarians...

The title is a political aphorism that has been attributed to George Will.  It means that a message that must be explained is too complicated for the audience.  Here are two pandemic-related examples, one old and one new. The old example is related to mask recommendations.  From late February to early March, several public health officials, including CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and Vice President Mike Pence were telling Americans not to wear masks.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying in a 60 Minutes interview on March 8, 2020: There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.  About a month later the CDC came to...