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...

  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 ...

  You can get COVID-19 and the seasonal flu at the same time. This has been known for some time. In fact, my brother-in-law got the combo back in 2020. But suddenly it's all over the news. Scientific American called it "a great example of how misinformation blooms." They point out that coverage exploded when an Israeli newspaper gave it a catchy name: Flurona.  I don't know, I rather like Fluvid. Though I must admit, Flurona does potentiate low-effort parody covers of My Sharona by The Knack: When you gonna give it to me, give it to me? It is just a matter of time Flurona? Is it just destiny, destiny? Or is it just a game in my mind, Flurona? In any case, the media is, predictably, now freaking out about it. The Daily Beast called it  a "a new nightmare to keep us awake at night." Is it? There is no evidence that it is. Sources I've read say dual infection is possible because both are respiratory diseases and both are transmitted via inhalation of ae...

  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 ...

  Are you one of the millions of people who take daily doses of a statin drug to lower cholesterol? If so you appear to have a small edge in the battle against COVID-19. A study recently published in PLOS Medicine looked at 963,876 people in Sweden. Over the study period some died of COVID-19 and some didn't.  Because Sweden has socialized medicine, the researchers were able to determine whether or not people in the study were using statins to lower cholesterol. They and compared each group in terms of COVID-19 mortality. The results indicate that that there is a statistically significant (i.e. non-random) effect. "Statin treatment was associated with a moderately lower risk of COVID-19 mortality," the authors concluded.  They stress that this was an observational study and not an experiment, meaning it shows an association but doesn't demonstrate cause. That's a standard caveat (limitation) for a study like this, but it's hard to imagine how the cause could ...