Corona-zona

Last night on the news I heard/saw rather breathless coverage of how bad the coronavirus outbreak is becoming in Japan. A "frightening spike" in cases according to the BBC . "Record breaking cases" leading to and expanded "state of emergency" according to NPR . One conjures images of Godzilla wreaking havoc on Tokyo. Everybody has been expecting things to go south over there, given the country's low vaccination rate . A reliable source told me the low rate is partly because the Japanese got started very late with vaccinations. That's because they believe they are "genetically distinct" and wouldn't approve vaccines for use until they had been clinically tested on Japanese people.  M'kay. Now infections are cranking up just in time for the "2020" Olympics. But how bad are things over there, really?   Well, no doubt cases are spiking.  Here is a chart from Our World in Data  showing the seven-day trailing average over the ...

  Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) Director, Dr. Cara Christ, is stepping down from her post. She has been in charge of the department since 2015, including through the pandemic. She has endorsed virtually every move of the governor's  public illness campaign . It hunts down even the smallest effort in the State of Arizona mitigate spread of the virus and kills it via executive order. I doubt Dr. Christ is a actually member of the conservative death cult , but her boss certainly is and she has been his enabler. One wonders how a public health official like her could stomach endorsing his policies, knowing full well how reckless they are.  Former ADHS Director Will Humble , who was at one time Christ's mentor, believes she abrogated her responsibility. I agree with what he says : When you’re linked up with a governor who is pushing you in directions that you fundamentally disagree with, you have a responsibility to do your job, not to keep your job. ...

  I sub-titled Sunday's numbers roundup "Welcome to Surge 3.0." Was I being alarmist about the Delta-fueled increases? On one hand, there are some indications that the increase may be short-lived.  Case rates are now dropping in Britain .  In the past, case rates there lead changes in the U.S. by a few weeks.  Here's a chart from last year from the World Economic Forum illustrating the point: Of course, that is from the first surge last year and we don't know if it held true for the second, big surge last winter.   Dr. Scott Gottlieb has speculated that this increase could be over in August. That would be consistent with the Britain-leads-US idea.  He also said a likely scenario is that cases will increase in the northern states as they decline in the southern ones. I sure hope he's right that this will be more of a blip than a surge. Yet he was FDA head during the Trump Administration and is now a member of a conservative think-tank. That means I ca...

Scores of stories are appearing on mainstream and social media about people who are sick with COVID-19 because they didn't get vaccinated. Predictably, they now regret their choices. Among the cases: An Alabama mom watched her son die and got seriously ill herself. "It took watching my son die and me suffering the effects of covid for us to realize we need the vaccine. We did not get vaccinated when we had the opportunity and regret that so much now.” A Florida mother of eight  nearly died, spending six days in the ICU. "I was one of those people that was like, ‘I can’t believe people are just going to inject their bodies with this medication. We don’t know enough about it.’ Now I’m just like it’s just a shot. Just get the stupid shot. That vaccine could have stopped all of this. Just one little shot. I feel foolish that I didn’t get it. I wish to God I would have got it because it’s not just about what it could have prevented me from experiencing physically in my life r...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended: As with last week, everything is heading in the wrong direction. Infection rates are up by 3-4 per 100K, percent positive tests is up. Delta now account for 2/3 of the sequences.   Here is a screenshot from the ASU dashboard of daily new cases (Xs) and a seven-day moving average of the same (yellow line).  It seems pretty clear that we are in Surge 3.0, with daily cases having almost tripled over the last three weeks. There are two changes to the table. First, I've started expressing COVID-19 inpatient beds as a percentage of beds available rather than as a raw number. That makes it a little easier to put the changes in context (IMO). If you want the raw numbers, you can find them on the ASU dashboard (linked above). It's encouraging that this number is only going up an average of around 1% per week, even though the infection rates are going up faster. Of course, there is a lag involved, so maybe hospitaliz...

  This blog will be off until next weekend as yours truly will be taking a much-needed vacation. But I just can't leave for a week without calling out Facebook (FB) for trying to play the victim the Biden administration's efforts to shame it for spreading anti-vax disinformation. First let us remember that FB has been trying to gaslight us  on this topic for months. They periodically announce new "crackdowns" on anti-vaxxers whenever the political heat gets too high. If any of these "crackdowns" had actually been effective, there would be no need for another one.  And make no mistake: If FB wanted to stop this garbage, they could. They have all the tools—the data, the graph analysis, the natural language processing, the machine learning algorithms, the compute power—to track down the vaccine mis/disinfo and get rid of it.  But FB doesn't want to do this. They want to appear to be doing it while continuing to make money off the traffic that mis/disinfo ...

  Here is the Arizona pandemic summary for the week just ended: These are some bad numbers , dear readers.  This is the first time since I've been doing this weekly summary (started Jan 17) that any increases on the order shown here have occurred.  If this isn't a new surge, its a kissing cousin. Everything is uniformly bad, except percent of population fully vaccinated.   A couple of rows have been removed from the table.  I removed S-gene dropouts per 100 tests because the numbers have dwindled—I assume because the Alpha variant is getting crowded-out by Delta.   There are continued problems getting information about percent of sequences that are Delta. For the last two weeks GIDAID has said that there is "no data" for Arizona for the preceding week.  I checked this week for last week's numbers, assuming there had been some reporting hicup. There were only 21 sequences, ten of which were Delta (shown as "1 week eralier" in the chart). ...