Corona-zona

This appears to be cave-in weekend for authoritarians around the world. First, Iran's attorney general announced it would abolish its "morality police." Then China announced it was going to back off its zero-COVID policy. It doesn't appear that all restrictions are being lifted everywhere. Instead the plan is to make the policy "more targeted and less onerous." Still the reversal seems significant, with restrictions—including the requirement to test negative before venturing anywhere in public—being lifted in most major cities. The authorities are spinning this as evidence of a "win" of sorts. The idea is that China weathered the Delta storm and can now relax because the Omicron variant is less deadly.  That is pretty much hogwash, a ccording to Linda Bauld , professor of public health at Edinburgh University: “With Omicron, certainly from the studies [so far], there may be some small reduction in disease severity but not a huge one.” It's g...

  News reports and breathless opinion pieces on both the right and left have painted a pretty bleak picture of social conflict during the pandemic. This seems to have subsided by now, but man, in 2020 and 2021 things were hot. We heard about people being attacked with hammers for wearing masks and others being confronted while shopping for not wearing masks. Workers at vaccine clinics have been attacked and called murderers . Workers asking for proof of vaccination have been attacked too. With all of this attacking going on, you'd be forgiven for thinking there is nowhere to hide from pressure to follow—or not follow—pandemic mitigation protocols. But there is new data suggesting that this impression is not a true picture of how things are, in Arizona anyway. CoVHORT is a research project on COVID-19 being conducted by the University of Arizona. It is longitudinal, meaning it collects data at multiple points over a long period, using the same participants. CoVHORT has just over...

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...

I have yet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2—as far as I know, at least not to the point that I became ill. I am knocking on wood as I write this.  Why have I not become infected? I know lots of other people who are not COVIDiots and take precautions. They are fully vaccinated and boosted (as am I). Still they've gotten infected, some of them more than once.  What is going on with us " NOVIDS ," then? Scientists are wondering this too, and over the past week this has been the subject of several articles I've run across.  This one says scientists are starting to close in on some explanations for why an estimated 30% of people in this country have never gotten COVID-19. One possibility is lucky genetic breaks. A study a couple of years ago identified a whole slew of genetic markers associated with people who've not become ill with COVID-19. Many of these are associated with "up-regulation of cholesterol biosynthesis" and "sequestration of ACE2 receptor...

  ASU's COVID-19 Community Response Team  has a new project that could help schools reduce the spread of COVID-19 by filtering the air. It's a timely effort considering that school is restarting just as the Omicron variant is running amok . Now that authorities have finally recognized that COVID-19 spreads mainly through the air, people are looking for ways to remove viral aerosol particles through filtration. If you're a school with plenty of money to spend you can buy some of these . But unless you're in a wealthy school district that is probably not affordable. Enter the Corsi-Rosenthal Cube . It's a DIY air filter built with high-efficiency MERV-13 furnace/AC filters and cardboard, duct-taped together and attached to a box fan. It is said to be just as effective as the high-priced commercial units, but the parts only cost around $100. I spoke with someone who is part of the Community Response Team. Over the last month they did a proof-of-concept with 15 units ...

I've been doing this blog for just about a year now. The first regular post was January 6, 2021. I'll reflect on that in a few days. Meanwhile, what kind of a media outlet would this be if I didn't do a year-in-review post? Looking back over the year's posts, it's amazing how much has been going on, and how much there potentially is to review. I can't spend all day on a detailed summary.  So I will try to focus on a bird's eye view. Vaccines & Anti-Vaxxers Vaccines have to be the biggest topic on this blog over the past year. Vaccines were very hard to get this time last year. A lot of people wanted them and the distribution was just getting started.  People had to navigate really crappy systems, like one in Arizona , to make reservations. There were " vaccine tourists " who would travel from other states and even countries in an effort to get jabbed.   Then, around March last year, those who wanted the shots had largely gotten them, and incre...

  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 ...

  About three weeks ago, I noted that infection rates were going up in the UK. It has a history of leading pandemic trends in the U.S. by a couple of weeks. Sure enough, now cases are rising all over the U.S. The same thing is happening all over Europe . On Saturday I blogged about the huge numbers of people in Arizona who are unvaccinated and previously uninfected as a way of explaining how we could still be seeing such high infection rates. But what about other states where they have higher vaccination rates? Vermont has the third-highest vaccination rate in the country, at 71.87%.  Yet they are experiencing a new surge of cases.  The estimated Vermont population is 623,251.  That's 8% of the population of Arizona, so it's important to adjust for that if we are going to compare them.  The infection rate for Arizona is 46.47 cases per 100K people (based on a 7-day average). The same figure for Vermont is 54.71. How can this be when they have such a high...

  A new study  is—as far as I know—the first truly controlled field experiment on mask effectiveness. The conclusion is that masks work.  We already knew masks work because you can see it for yourself . But it's one thing to see that masks block droplets and another to know that this translates into meaningful protection at the community level. This latest study involved 600 villages in Bangladesh, which have a combined population of 342,126 adults. Researchers randomly selected some of the villages to be in the treatment group and the rest were in the control group.   For eight weeks, people in the treatment villages received free masks, information on the importance of masking, role modeling by community leaders, and in-person reminders. Villages in the control group received none of that. Researchers visited the villages every week over the study period to observe how many people were properly wearing masks and social distancing at mosques, markets, the ...

Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has had his wings clipped by a Florida judge.  The judge threw out his ban on mask mandates in schools.  The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by parents who were worried about their kids getting exposed to the virus while at school.  The judge concluded that mandated mask use is "reasonable and consistent with the best scientific and medical opinion in this country." DeSantis had planned to withhold funds from schools who defied his ban. The judge said he would issue an injunction prohibiting that.   The judge also suggested, essentially, that DeSantis should grow up and look for solutions rather than throwing bombs in the culture war.  "We will not solve any issue if we can't sit down and work together and take positions recognizing what's going on is not some recent imposition or some attack on the country," he said. Somebody buy that judge a beer.  Apparently not everyone in Florida is equal parts stupid and d...

  Last month I blogged about Governor Doug Ducey's latest asshatery. It was an executive order banning elementary and secondary schools from requiring masks in their classrooms.  Prior to that he issued an order preventing universities from implementing, basically, any mandatory mitigation measures. His executive orders became law when Republicans attached them to a  budget bill they passed last month. We are finally seeing some major pushback. School districts are unwilling to endanger children in their care as the number of kids hospitalized with COVID-19 doubled in July . Several of them are ignoring the ban and requiring masks for students. Now a group—including the Arizona School Boards Association, Children's Action Alliance, the Arizona Education Association, Arizona Advocacy Network, and a dozen other individuals—is taking things a step further. They have filed a lawsuit against the state. The filing claims that attaching the public illness measures to the bud...

  The other day, I did a post criticizing Gov. Doug Ducey's executive order promoting public illness at state funded universities and community colleges.  However, I missed a detail that moves the order into a category beyond asinine.  As I noted before, the order says schools can't require proof of vaccination, and they can't require people to wear masks. But I missed that it also bans requiring testing for students and employees.   In other words, Ducey is prohibiting colleges and universities from taking any mitigation steps whatsoever .  Schools can't require vaccinations, the one thing that would make masks and testing unnecessary.  They also can't require masks, which would help prevent infected people from spreading the virus in poorly ventilated classrooms.  But they also can't test to identify infected people and keep them away from people who are uninfected.  That's straight-up reckless . Testing doesn't threaten anyone's "freedom....

  Today, I offer for your reading enjoyment updates on some topics discussed previously in this blog. Surges I've recently written about worries over new surges .  A piece in today's NYT declares the pandemic out-of-control in Michigan.  Sadly, the governor there has been cowed into tepid pleas for responsible behavior in lieu of concrete action. Hard to blame her after armed covidiots plotted to kidnap and execute her. I hope those assholes are on ventilators right now.   The surge there is blamed on the UK variant, which is apparently taking over the country .  The good news is that the vaccines seem pretty effective against it. The vaccine makers are also working on boosters , expected by the end of the year.    That's good news.  The bad news is that there's a... Vaccine Wall As predicted here a month ago, vaccination rates are hitting a wall. We're starting to run out of people who want the shots. It's starting to show, especially in...

 I'm a little pressed for time today, so in place of a regular post I recommend, for your reading enjoyment, an excellent essay from New York Magazine. It's entitled How the West Lost COVID . It's lengthy, but well done and well worth the read.  It asks the question, why did The U.S. and Europe fare so badly while countries in Asia, Oceana, and Africa got and kept the pandemic under control? I won't give any spoilers. But it has a lot to do with a feckless political culture in the West, and it offers some potential lessons learned for next time. Image by  Gerhard G.  from  Pixabay  

  The CDC has released new guidance suggesting that kids can be as close as three feet apart when in school. The previous standard was six feet. I have always thought that putting kids together in poorly ventilated classrooms for long periods, no matter what the separation, was just asking for trouble. Kids are more likely to have asymptomatic infections . They travel back and forth between home and school, making classrooms potential distribution points for infection. The thing is, there is no evidence of this.  The CDC says "[b]ased on the data available, in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission." Now an just-published study shows there is no difference between three and six feet either. It's a very thorough study of 266 school districts comparing those that maintained six or more feet of separation with those that maintained three or more feet of separation. It controlled for a range of factors including other as...

  As I noted earlier this week , public health experts are concerned that a new wave of infections may be hitting the U.S., and that hotspots are reemerging.  I wanted to look into this further so I went to see what information the CDC has on offer. I found exactly what I was looking for in the Community Profile Report . It's a data geek's wet dream of maps showing every conceivable measure by county, and how those measures have changed over the last seven days. They present one map, the "area of concern continuum by county."  It boils down all the indicators—new cases, positive tests, deaths, hospitalizations, etc.—to "describe communities as they progress through stages of the epidemic."  Here is the map for March 16: Congratulations to Kansas.  Also, the report notes that Missouri just dumped a bunch of backlog data, making it look worse than it is.   Otherwise most states have some problem areas.  Of particular concern are the hotspots in the ...

  For some time now, public health officials in the U.S. have been worried about a another wave of COVID-19. Their concern is based on two things.   First, infections are down from the holiday surge. U.S. vaccination rates  accelerating , with the U.S. approaching one-third of its population having at least one vaccination. So of course  marshmallow-eating state officials are recklessly removing mitigation measures despite infection rates as high as the peak of the summer surge. They're taking their foot off the brake just when it looks like we might have virus beat. Now people are crowding into  Las Vegas  and the  beaches in Florida .   Second, there are new variants  popping up all over the place that appear to make the virus more contagious and virulent. There are mixed messages about whether these variants are also better able to evade immune responses from previous infections or vaccinations. Some reports say they are ,...

  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who allegedly has his own problems following the law—is suing Travis County, and the state capitol it encompasses, Austin. Those jurisdictions are refusing to to comply with an order from their marshmallow-eating governor to rescind all pandemic restrictions, including mask ordinances. This is just so messed up. First, public health experts uniformly agree that the Texas governor's move is reckless . Travis County and Austin officials are just doing what they think is right to protect the health and safety of their citizens. Paxton is basically suing to force those officials to endanger their citizens. Second, once upon a time, Republicans like Paxton (and Abbott) were all about devolving power and championing states' rights . This is the exact same thing, only one level down. Apparently it's only important to devolve power until you're the one wielding the power and the subordinate entities make decisions you don't like. Third...

  One day last summer, I was washing dishes and noticed some pain in my fingertip. I looked at it and there was a small cut. I assumed I had accidentally nicked myself with a knife. I applied some liquid bandage to cover it, and didn't give it another thought. Then a week or so later, I noticed a similar cut on my thumb, but this time I hadn't been in proximity to knives. Because they are on my fingertips, these little cuts hurt like hell, especially when I get hand sanitizer—a.k.a cut finder —in there.  The same thing has happened to a number of my friends, and it turns out that we are victims of skin fissures . They are caused by dry skin, and are especially common on fingertips because the skin there is less elastic than elsewhere. From what I've been able to learn, the dryness could be caused by atopic dermatitis (eczema) but might also be due to less dramatic causes.  Since this just started happening over the past year, I wondered if it could be pandemic related....

  A  famous study done at Stanford in 1972 tried to find out if young children were able to forego an immediate reward in anticipation of a larger reward later. A researcher would show a kid a marshmallow and tell them something like "I'm going to leave for a while and leave this marshmallow with you. You can eat it if you want, but if it's still here when I get back, I will give you another marshmallow, so you can eat two." Videos of the experiments are hilarious, with many of the kids struggling to summon the willpower to not eat the marshmallow. Some succeed, and some cave-in and eat the treat. Follow-up studies years later showed that kids who were able to hold out had better outcomes in terms of education and other life outcomes (those findings have since come under question.) Falling infection numbers are presenting a marshmallow test of sorts to state governments, and they are failing spectacularly. On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott proudly  tweeted that...