Corona-zona

  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...

  Just when you think people can't get any crazier, there's this. Mask-hole parents are bombarding schools with fake notices of claim, threatening to file them against their surety bonds if the schools don't do what they want. This includes ending masking policies and various other things. They're being egged-on by a website and Telegram group called "Bonds for the Win." The website is run by this fruitcake woman in Scottsdale named Miki Klann who thinks the Earth is flat and that AIDS is a hoax. Here is an example of one of their documents served in Michigan. It lists 15 violations of state, federal, and international law—including the Nuremberg code, naturally—that the school has supposedly committed. All legal experts agree that these claims are 100% bullshit. This type of bond fraud   is a form of paper terrorism and was innovated by the sovereign citizens movement . They flooded courts with invalid pseudo-legal documents claiming they are not subject t...

  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...

   Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary and graph of seven-day average of new cases for the week just ended:* This week everything is going in the right direction, even deaths for the first time in a long time. The only red numbers are from deaths over the last month and Arizona rank among states in vaccinations. The deaths aren't surprising since as noted before those lag infections. The rank has been dithering for some time now. One slightly discouraging thing is that the decrease in cases seems to be bottoming-out. Both state and county rates declined by 28 over the last week, but the previous week they declined by over 60, and the week before that by around 90.  The new cases graph seems to be leveling off too. Hopefully it will continue moving downward. We are still at a little more than double the case rate of last spring. The decline in new hospital beds may be leveling off too, according to the dual-axis graph. As with last week, decline in news deaths is ...

The other day I ran across this opinion piece in The Guardian . In it a Columbia sociologist tries to explain why it's perfectly understandable that people would resist vaccinations against COVID-19. He repeatedly refers to "Left-leaning people" and "progressives," and practices whataboutism with respect to T****'s mishandling of the pandemic. So he has a right-wing agenda.  Another thing that makes me think that is the tone of the piece, which is condescending and smarty-pants.  He gives 13 reasons in all why people might reasonably resist vaccines. I won't go through these one by one, but rather address three categories into which they fall.   Several points focus on the novelty and speed of production of the vaccines. Several more focus on side-effects of the vaccines. While these might have been reasonable concerns a year ago, today they are nothing short of ridiculous.  Bloomberg estimates that more then 10.4 billion doses of the vaccines have be...

  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 ...