Corona-zona

A few days ago, the CDC released new "streamlined" COVID-19 guidance  "to help the public better protect themselves and understand their risk." According to the author of the new guidance, it "acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives."  The new guidelines deemphasize prevention of transmission and emphasize prevention of severe disease. Greta Massetti, a C.D.C. epidemiologist, said at a news briefing on Thursday: We know that Covid-19 is here to stay. High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection, and the many tools that we have available to protect people from severe illness and death, have put us in a different place. What's in the new guidelines?  Here's an abbreviated list: Be up to date on vaccinations Do the same thing if your exposed whether you're vaccinated or not, namely wear a good mask for 10 days and get te...

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...

  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...

Arizona is on course to pass two laws to make pandemics spread more efficiently (HT @willhumble_az on Twitter). They appear to be do-overs to compensate for the legislature's fail   at attaching similar measures to a budget bill last year. One bans mask requirements in schools.  H.B. 2616   Prohibits the state or a political subdivision, governmental entity, school district or charter school from requiring a person under 18 years of age to wear a mask or face covering without the express consent of the person's parent or guardian.   And that's it. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Some virus could come along that spreads like measles and kills three-quarters of the people it infects. Schools would be powerless to prevent its spread. What breathtaking stupidity. The other, H.B. 2498   Prohibits the state or any political subdivision that receives or uses tax revenues (governmental entity) from requiring an Arizona resident to receive a vaccinatio...

  This just in: A federal judge in Florida (because of course Florida) has struck down a CDC rule requiring people on airplanes and other mass transit to wear masks. The judge in question was appointed by T**** (because of course she was). The judge said in her ruling that the CDC never had the authority to issue these mandates. I suppose she never read section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264). It  says "the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states." As Steve Vladek, professor of law at the University of Texas said : This is both a big deal and a truly preposterous (nationwide) injunction. The CDC’s statutory authority is specifically directed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases across state lines. Where else is such spread more likely to occur than transport hubs like airports? Whe...

  The United States—and to be fair the rest of the world, but I will focus on here—whiffed the pandemic. We ignored warnings and abandoned programs designed to give us what little preparedness that we had. We couldn't make enough PPE or medical equipment, or ramp-up testing when we needed it most. Our reward is almost a million people dead, and around 11 million people with "long COVID." There were plenty of people warning us that we were unprepared for this. Back in 2005, Bush wanted to invest in preparedness  (for a replay of the Spanish Flu), but Congress wouldn't listen. In 2014, Obama asked for money to prepare for an Ebola epidemic, cut Congress wouldn't listen. In 2015 Bill Gates did a TED talk about how we weren't ready for a pandemic, nobody listened. Then just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, the Trump administration undermined a federal-level pandemic unit that had been established. Now it's looking like deja vu all over again...

  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...

  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 ...

  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...

  Cochise County (CC) is in the Southeastern-most part of the state and encompasses Bisbee, Sierra Vista, and Wilcox. A story  recently published on tuscon.com about pandemic relief funds came to my attention the other day.  For a little context, CC was particularly hard-hit by COVID-19 over the fall. Its cases per 100K  exceeded those for Maricopa County (MC), according to the ASU dashboard .  Now, whereas case rates in MC and the state overall appear to have peaked , in CC they are still increasing. Today it has about 27% more cases per 100K (seven-day average) than the state's largest county. Against this backdrop the CC Board of Supervisors were considering an intergovernmental agreement with the Arizona Department of Health Services that would have provided them $1.9M in funds to help deal with the pandemic. The CC Health Services Director explained that the money was needed for things like additional personnel, equipment, mobile community health services,...

Last week the Biden administration said it's planning to ramp up vaccine production capacity to produce at least a billion extra doses per year by the end of 2022. That will be done by investing in companies with experience making mRNA vaccines. I've not been able to find details about how this investment will work. I'm a little worried that this will be another case of the government investing millions in pharma companies and helping them invent things, only to have them hog all the spoils like Moderna is trying to do now. This story was framed as a response to pressure to do more for poorer foreign countries, most of which have very low vaccination rates. That makes sense, because those are breeding grounds for new variants that could travel to the U.S. and wreak havoc like Delta has done. But something else caught my eye in the announcement. White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said : "This program would also help us produce doses within six to...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  Today, several updates on matters previously discussed on this blog. Florida Fires Back at Idaho Last week, I reported that Idaho was challenging Florida for the title of top COVIDiot state by appointing to a health board a medical doctor who opposes masks and vaccines and supports ivermectin.   Well, Florida was not about to take that challenge lying down! Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis did them one better by making another such medical doctor the state's surgeon general . Take that, Idaho! Doctors Who Spread Misinformation Are Starting to Face Discipline I have never understood how medical professional organizations have been able to look the other way while their members dispense disinformation about pandemic-related topics like masks and vaccines. As noted earlier, many of these physicians are doing it to make money . Idaho even  appointed one of them  to a medical board. It seems the professional organizations are finally losing patience with t...

  This blog has featured lots of coverage  of Florida and its reckless pandemic behaviors and policies. I never thought any state could challenge their position as the Top COVIDiot State. But Idaho is making a serious run at it.   According to data from the last seven days compiled by the NY Times, Idaho ranks 9th worst among states with 68 cases per 100K, a 19% increase over the previous week.  It ranks 12th worst with 37 hospitalizations per 100K, a 29% increase over the previous week.  And it ranks fourth worst with 1.22 deaths per 100K (no change info given).  Here is a comparison table: Florida is still beating Idaho on hospitalizations and deaths. But don't let that get you down, Idaho! Florida's case and hospitalization trends are downward whereas yours are upward. You can still take the lead! I am gratified to see that Arizona is doing so well in this comparison. Our governor is fighting like hell be as pro-disease as his counterparts in ...

Just when you think things can't get any crazier. The Daily Mail reports that a group of veterans formed a group and was mulling armed attacks on vaccine centers and employees. Because the vaccinations are causing...what harm? Veterans 4 Freedom (V4F) is made up of more than 200 douchebags who used to serve in the military.  They pretended to be a peaceful group while using the encrypted messaging app Telegram to discuss violent insurrection. They were infiltrated by a reporter. One member said they were "bringing the fight to the people sticking the needle in." The Daily Mail piece caused the leader of the group, someone named Bellzaac, to call off the group's operations.  Talking out of both sides of his mouth, he said in public on Twitter, "basically we were a peaceful group and have been labelled with being something we are not. We wanted to do this legally & lawfully."  On the other hand, in private on Telegram he was saying "we are fucking ...

  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...

  Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is continuing his public illness campaign. This time he is banning schools from quarantining kids who have been exposed to COVID-19. He has already made it so schools can't require vaccinations and masks. Apparently, he feels that this did not do enough to promote public illness.  So Ducey has now sent a letter to schools saying they can't keep sick kids away, either. Y'know, so they can come in and transmit the more contagious Delta variant to all the unvaccinated, unmasked kids who haven't gotten it yet. Wow. I don't know what to say about this other than WTF? His behavior is unhinged and despicable. Normal governors do things to protect children. This one is doing the exact opposite, and with gusto.   To their credit, the schools are pushing back. They note that following guidance in Ducey's letter violates public health policy set by by the CDC, the Arizona Department of Health (i.e. Ducey's own agency), and the County heal...

  [Hey...been off for a couple days due to work demands. I had a choice of what to post about today, but I'd be remiss if I didn't cover this particular topic.] Yesterday the Arizona governor dropped another Ducey, signing an order prohibiting universities from mandating vaccines or masks. You can't require people to be vaccinated, and you can't require those that aren't (or can't be) to wear masks to prevent them from catching or spreading disease.  This is—straight up—an order to promote public illness. It's like when Ducey decided in spring 2020 to ban local government mask mandates, only to change his mind when Arizona became the worst place in the world for COVID-19. If we needed masks to prevent illness then, why are they bad now? Of course, Ducey says this is all about individual freedom. But it's not just about individuals. If you don't get vaccinated and also don't wear a mask, you are endangering not only yourself but others around yo...