Corona-zona

  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...

  I used to do these roundup posts more frequently, when pandemic news was coming in so fast and furious that even my (then) daily posts couldn't keep up. As it happens, the last couple of weeks has produced several tidbits that are too limited for their own post, but still worthy of sharing.  One Cable News Outlet (Guess Which One) Causes Vaccine Hesitancy A recent study  published in in Nature looked at how watching a certain cable news outlet causes increased vaccine hesitancy. The researchers used exogenous (i.e. not study related) geographical variation in the channel lineup to tease out the causal effects. They controlled for differences in partisanship, local health policies, local COVID-19 infections/death rates, and consumption of other major television networks.  The network in question is—wait for it—Fox News. I for one am shocked. SHOCKED!  Every one additional hour watching Fox News per week for the average household reduced the number of vaccinati...

  Back in December, I blogged about a new vaccine that sounded pretty exciting. It was developed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) and showed positive results in animal models. The exciting thing is it is designed around a soccer-ball-shaped molecule to which could be attached a whole bunch of different spike proteins from different variants. Your immune system would react to all of them providing you universal protection. Human clinical trials were starting at the time I wrote the blog, and I've been unable to determine the status. An undated posting  I found said they were in their third month and still needed participants. Now the study is no longer listed on their clinical trials recruiting page . So either they have all the participants they need or are done with the trial. If I learn any more about it I will update. Anyway, it may become obsolete because researchers have  reported  the discovery of a new antibody called SP1-77 tha...

  Health officials have  announced the discovery of three cases of measles in Maricopa County. "One case is an adult and the other two are in minors. One case was hospitalized. All three are unvaccinated, and they are all recovering." This isn't exactly shocking. Back in 2015 the CDC said Arizona had the worst vaccination rate of any state in the country. I can't find any more recent state ranking data, but this story says the rate continues to decline and now stands at around 90% in Arizona. That's 8% below the level necessary for population immunity. This development comes in the wake of the pandemic. Anti-vaxxers have treated it as a golden opportunity to grow their brand , leading to  increased sales of their quack cures and remedies.   Now, more parents are holding back on vaccinations of any kind. Jason Terk, MD, a pediatrician practicing in Keller, Texas said : “It’s becoming much more challenging for me to convince people to get their kids vaccinated...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used vaccine disinformation to justify his opinion in a case before the Supreme Court. It appeared in a dissent in the ruling on DR. A., ET AL. v. KATHY HOCHUL, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK, ET AL., where the majority opinion upheld New York's vaccine mandeate for health care workers. In his dissent Thomas said, in part,  Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.    Thomas cited this as a sound reason for objecting to vaccinations on religious grounds. The only problem? It's not true, or more accurately, it's only 1/3 true. Of the three major vaccines, only Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vaccine requires fetal cells for production. Moderna and Pfizer only used the cell lines in testing.  But still the cells were used for...

Florida has chosen not to preorder pediatric doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis says doctors, clinics, and hospitals can just fend for themselves without getting the state involved. That's interesting, because every other state besides Florida has decided that they should not fend for themselves and have preordered the vaccines. Every other state.  "To do an emergency use for a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old simply to placate anxiety, that's not the standard when you're doing this," said DeSantis , the pediatric medicine expert. He's right. It's to placate anxiety resulting from the needless death of a child. Over 900 of them have done so in the pandemic to date. DeSantis's sycophant state Surgeon General Joseph Lapado agreed: "From what I've seen, there is just insufficient data to inform benefits and risks in children." It's a pretty safe bet that what he's seen comes from ant...

  The CDC has not done the best job of communicating its pandemic advice, frequently changing its mind. Who can forget in 2020 when they said we did not need to wear masks, only to change course and say we did need to wear them after all? In April 2021 they said vaccinated people should wear masks indoors, then two weeks later changed and said they didn't have to, then a month later changed and said they did. To be fair, they are working in a high-uncertainty environment. They don't call it the "novel" coronavirus for nothing. Now we have another change on the second vaccine booster. Up until now they've said it's only recommended for people over 65 or with underlying conditions.  This week that changed that to say people 50 and over should definitely get their second booster. The stated reasons for the change are a recent increase in cases and a “a steep and substantial increase in hospitalizations for older Americans.”  I know all kinds of people who have ...

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...

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday, and Pima/Yavapai counties and Tempe wastewater surveillance: In the table, everything is in the right direction, except a slight increase in COVID-19 hospital beds. Cases are now at their lowest point since a year ago. Despite my worries last week, it seems there is not a new wave brewing in Arizona...yet. Wastewater signals are, however, increasing in Pima and Yavapai counties—but decreasing in Tempe. Note that all the wastewater data are a week to ten days old.  That's too bad because this is the only thing we have that can provide an early warning. Here is an excellent explainer  from an epidemiologist (HT u/Soundvessel on Reddit) on why case rates are unreliable indicators now. Note especially the first graph showing a huge disconnect in the UK between current case counts and cases detected in random sampling (something I've noted before ) that started in January....

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday, as well as the most recent update of Tempe wastewater surveillance: The most concerning aspects of the table and first graph is a rather large uptick in cases at the state level. Could this be the start of a new wave?  There is reason to worry because epidemiologists have warned that it is just a matter of time until the current wave in Europe makes its way over here. JP  Weiland, a scientist who does modeling of disease spread, tweeted a graph predicting that the decline in cases would bottom out this week and be followed by another period of increasing cases. I thought we were getting an early start on a new wave until I saw this tweet from Garret Archer, a data journalist who works for ABC 15. He was informed by AzDHS prior to this week's data dump that cases would go up due to a testing provider just now reporting some data that should have been reported i...

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research  People who study the evolution of viruses published an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times about the likely future evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Here are some high-points of the essay. First, viruses evolve to survive and reproduce better. That is just what they do. There is no reason to think SARS-CoV-2 will stop evolving. Second, there are still plenty of pathways available for further evolution. The writers reckon there are "nearly 2000 other ways the 201 targeted amino acids could could mutate and still be able to attach to human cells." Third, the evolutionary pressure on the virus is to become better at spreading. It can do this by becoming more contagious and/or better at evading the immune system. They say it is "remarkable" how good this virus has been at responding to that pressure. Fourth, how much more transmissible the virus could become is unknown. There is not an infinite capacity: "a cheetah can’t evolve t...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Everything continues on the downtrend, though cases are declining by smaller amounts every week (as we'd expect). Deaths are going down now, and hospital beds continue decreasing. Maricopa county now lists the community level as "low." Looking at the graph, it's hard to believe how bad things were just two months ago. Wastewater Fail As noted in Sunday's post , I had intended to add wastewater numbers to the table, and I did put the one-week and four-week values in there. However, the Pima county numbers have vanished from the CDC site , including historical ones. It's odd because they were there just four days ago. I've sent an email to the dataset owner about this, but have not received a response.   It's not clear to me when Tempe updates their dashboard . It's currently showing data from two weeks ago, just like it was doing on Sunday...

" Double ouch, double vaccination "  by  jacco de boer  is marked with  CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .   The CSC has added new data on the risk of hospitalizations for unvaccinated kids 5-11 years old relative to those who are vaccinated. The data are from January, when the Omicron wave was still active. Here is their chart: If you divide the unvaccinated rate by the vaccinated rate and average over the five weeks represented, the ratio is 5.23 to 1.  In other words, unvaccinated kids in this age range were, during the period covered, on average more than five times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. Granted, the risk is small either way. The highest rate, on January 22, was only 3.9 per 100K. But when it's your kid I'm pretty sure you'd prefer the risk 1/3 as high for the vaccinated group.

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Everything continues to look good. Case rates are essentially down to levels seen last spring. Hospital beds are declining and are below ten percent. There is a slight uptick in deaths, but it's a fraction of a case per 100K and it is expected for deaths to lag case declines. However, I worry this may be an "enjoy it while you can" situation. Case rates are increasing in Europe again due to the so-called "stealth" Omicron variant .  They have seen case rates roughly double from late February to mid-March. In Arizona, just yesterday it was reported to  account for 10% of cases in Pima County. Experience shows that what happens in Europe tends to happen here about two weeks later. Now, thanks to our leaders  failing a marshmallow test  and dropping reporting frequencies to weekly, we are not going to know the increase is hitting in Arizona until it...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Except for a fractional percent increase in deaths, everything continues to look good. The seven-day average of cases shown in the graph is comparable to levels last seen in mid-july last year when Delta was just cranking up. The curve appears to be continuing downward, so in another week we might be back to spring 2021 levels.  I take the Maricopa county numbers with a grain of salt. For one thing, the cases per 100K are reported "for the most current calendar week of data 02/27-03/05." So the numbers are lagged by five days. Second, I divide the number they list (55) by seven to get a seven-day average. It seems like an awfully big drop from last week, though not an impossible one. Third, none of their numbers line up with their "community transmission indicators." On a detail page they say total new cases per 100K in the range of 0-9 is low, 10-49 ...

  Unless you're an anti-vax moron, you already accept that vaccines are safe and effective. You also know that a booster is important to strengthening your immunity, and that this immunity is likely to be enduring . That all describes me, but even I didn't know how dramatic the effects of boosters really are. I found out last week, when AzDHS released an analysis of the effects of vaccinations on COVID-19 rates and outcomes. The bottom line (well actually top line) result is that, compared to people who are fully vaxxed and boosted, unvaccinated people have 11 times the risk of testing positive, 67 times the risk of being hospitalized, and 180 times the risk of dying.  Breaking out groups who are unvaccinated, fully vaccinated, and fully vaccinated plus booster, and looking at the Omicron period, there are few differences between the first two groups in case rates, and only a very small rate for the third. There are big differences between the first two on hospitalizations a...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: This is my first summary since the state switched to weekly reporting of data. Before I point out changes, I note that everything is moving in the right direction, and cases are moving below the levels from last fall's Delta surge, hopefully headed for near-zero. Changes As for changes, first, I an getting data directly form the AzDHS and Maricopa County dashboards. The former now updates on Wednesday, and the latter updates case numbers a day late, which is why I'll be posting this summary on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays.  Second, obviously the new cases graph can no longer show daily values, but will include numbers from every Wednesday instead. It's not quite as smooth but otherwise no big loss. Third, you will notice that the past values and change values for vaccinations are blank. That's because in researching the mystery surge in vaccination perc...

  A discussion today over on the CoronavirusAZ subreddit about Arizona death rates got me thinking about how Indian country fared on this outcome. A little over a year ago I blogged about how the tribes in Northeast Arizona were killing it with their vaccination programs.  Even today, their vaccination rates make the state's largest county look lame. According to this recent ranking , out of 15 counties in the state Apache County is number one (95% vaccinated), Navajo County is number four (75.3%), and Maricopa County comes in at number ten (55.8%).  So how have these counties fared in terms of death rates? I got data on reported deaths from the ASU Dashboard , converted these figures to new deaths per 100K population, then took the seven-day average of that.  Here is a chart based on that data: Sadly, the tribes' excellent vaccination uptake didn't save them from higher death rates than Maricopa County, save for a few random days. Overall the latter is below the t...

  Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* This is the last of these Sunday reports I will be able to do because AzDHS has cut its reporting interval from daily to weekly. I will keep doing these summaries, but obviously I won't be able to include any of the graphs that are based on daily data. Also they will be reporting data on Wednesday and I will do the same. One consequence already this week is that they did not publish hospital bed numbers for yesterday because they stopped daily reporting yesterday and hospital numbers are always a day late. So I imputed yesterday's value by subtracting from Friday's value the average daily decrease over the last week. Anyway, the table looks really good. Case rates continue to plunge and from the graph you can see that they are continuing to fall below Delta levels last autumn.   The big surprise in the table is the 7.1% increase in fully vaxxed people, mo...

 It's not very often that I get to post good news on this blog, but today is one of the times. New research says that if you're double-vaxxed and boosted, you're good—probably for a long time, and probably against a wide variety of current and potential future variants. It has been known for some time that levels of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 wane in the months following the second vaccine dose. Protection may decrease substantially, in one study  dropping from 90+% to 70%. This is why last fall the CDC authorized booster shots for anybody who wanted one. Recent studies have come out (one published here , another one in pre-print  so not yet reviewed) showing that vaxxed and boosted people's immune systems are primed for recognizing all kinds of SARS spike proteins and targeting them if provoked. The effect isn't from antibodies per se, which wane like they always have. But our immune systems have "memory" cells that can recognize an infection and trig...