Covid-19 #36: I am the Apples and the Oranges

[Heartofice]

8 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

Again, summer. 

Maybe, I don’t think so though. We opened up when schools were still open and that’s when we had our peak. It hasn’t really changed the hospitalisation rate for kids.

In case there is confusion there, in my opinion we had opened up long before ‘freedom day’ on July 19th

[Iskaral Pust]

I brought my son to a mall yesterday for some in-person clothes fitting ahead of his return to school (on-line shopping doesn’t really work for that).  Only ~20% of people were wearing masks inside the mall and stores, including staff.  No-one was being asked to mask, no-one was monitoring it at all.  Apparently Americans have no fucks left to give.

[rotting sea cow]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

The UK data ( which is almost entirely delta) doesn’t really seem to support the theory that Delta is sufficiently more dangerous than the other strains to younger people . Under 18s hospital admissions peaked at about 6% of total admissions last October and during this wave it’s averaging out at about 6% again.
 

And that’s even taking into account that the percentage of admissions is going to be younger because older people are vaccinated. Also the data doesn’t really break down into anything more than ‘under 18’ from what I can see.

Yep. I'm not sure what it's happening in US children, if indeed something is happening. We need numbers.

Something I read somewhere, is it seems there is also a wave of off-season respiratory diseases around. RSV, para-influenza, etc. Plus SARS-CoV-2 Delta upgrade and (at least) some children have con-infections. Maybe a factor?

Social distancing is not good for the immune system in the long term.

 

[Zorral]

48 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Apparently Americans have no fucks left to give.

It sure does look that way.  Which is all more tragic for the health care providers and also for the rest of us, who still have medical issues that need attention, but there is no attention or personnel to give it, as the narcissist covid deniers have demanded it all for themselves as narcissists do. 

For kids, you want numbers?  Numbers for the last weeks are given in the links in a post on the previous screen, by hospitals and the caregivers here in the US.

[Luzifer's right hand]

The music festival I went to made national news because unlike all other recent festivals in Austria and one in Croatia it seems the have caused no clusters in Austria. 

I guess if you actually stick to the green certificate rules things actually work.

[Zorral]

"Too Many People Are Dying Right Now “It’s hard to look at these indicators and feel at all optimistic,” explains scientist Eric Topol.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/too-many-people-are-dying-of-covid-19-right-now.html

Quote

 

. . . .The U.S. numbers are a bit wobbly these days, and there are huge variations state to state, reflecting disparities in vaccination rates, among other things. But at the national level, at least for the moment, the reduction of mortality risk seems to be considerably smaller [than experts expected a few weeks ago]. In the worst of the winter surge, the country was registering 250,000 new cases per day; at its peak, that surge was killing roughly 3,000 Americans each day (often a bit above, but with a few dips below). Today, we have a bit more than 100,000 new cases each day, though the numbers are still rising as part of the Delta wave. If we had reduced mortality risk by 75 percent, that would mean about 300 daily deaths. If we had reduced it by 90 percent, it would mean 120. Instead, in our seven-day average, we just passed 500. 

Things may be even worse than that, though. In general, epidemiologists expect a lag of a week or two, perhaps more, between case peaks and death peaks — essentially the time it takes for a new case to progress through the full course of disease. Early in the pandemic, the lag was a bit longer, though in the U.S. during the winter surge, the gap between peaks was less than one week. And comparing case data from even one week ago with today’s death data reveals an even grimmer picture: about 75,000 cases per day then yielding the current average of 500 deaths, suggesting the mortality rate had fallen by less than half since winter. If you work from two-week-old data, it suggests that the mortality rate had hardly fallen at all. Applying the winter ratio to the case load from July 24 would predict an average of 600 daily deaths. On Friday, there were 763.

For a couple weeks now, concerned Americans have taken comfort in the Delta experience of other countries, namely the U.K. and the Netherlands, whose Delta waves had begun earlier and who had — very roughly — similar vaccination rates to ours. In those countries, as models would have suggested given our expectations for vaccines, caseloads dramatically diverged from hospitalizations and deaths, with case numbers growing much, much faster than severe disease, which stayed, all things considered, pretty low. That simply does not seem to be happening here, even though the vaccines are working well enough that hospitalization and death remain, for breakthrough cases, very rare. Could these trends reflect rates of under-testing? To some extent, of course. But how much?

On Saturday morning, looking at Friday’s figures, I emailed Topol to ask if he was as worried as I was. Yes, he said. We spoke again later in the afternoon.

 

Interview follows.
 

[Kalbear]

Quote

. . . .The U.S. numbers are a bit wobbly these days, and there are huge variations state to state, reflecting disparities in vaccination rates, among other things. But at the national level, at least for the moment, the reduction of mortality risk seems to be considerably smaller [than experts expected a few weeks ago]. In the worst of the winter surge, the country was registering 250,000 new cases per day; at its peak, that surge was killing roughly 3,000 Americans each day (often a bit above, but with a few dips below). Today, we have a bit more than 100,000 new cases each day, though the numbers are still rising as part of the Delta wave. If we had reduced mortality risk by 75 percent, that would mean about 300 daily deaths. If we had reduced it by 90 percent, it would mean 120. Instead, in our seven-day average, we just passed 500. 

But sure, Delta isn't more dangerous, riiight

[Luzifer's right hand]

Just now, Kaligator said:

But sure, Delta isn't more dangerous, riiight

I kinda hope it is a combination of people going too late to the hospital because they don't believe in Covid-19 and because health care is really expensive in the US.

I mean numbers from European countries that had infection spikes don't look that bad. Most countries still have some covid-19 rules though and many are ramping them up again.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I kinda hope it is a combination of people going too late to the hospital because they don't believe in Covid-19 and because health care is really expensive in the US.

I mean numbers from European countries that had infection spikes don't look that bad. Most countries still have some covid-19 rules though and many are ramping them up again.

Vaccines have changed the game in the UK for sure. Before they arrived, we were at a peak of about 1200 deaths a day! After vaccines its more like 80. Delta or not, if you have vaccines the death rate is dropping hugely.

[Zorral]

1 minute ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Most countries still have some covid-19 rules though and many are ramping them up again.

While here, stupidly, leaders said those of us vaccinated no longer needed to mask or worry ... which meant EVERYBODY took off their masks and gathered indoors with friends and family.  Of which vaccinated EVERYBODY is less than half, and in big swathes of the they are proudly almost entirely unvaccinated.  So here we are.  That interview in the NY Magazine [free to read] I linked to above, is pretty disheartening for the US, where we do all things Freedumb and Individual and the hell with it if my freedumb kills you, my kids or myself.  And right now their freedumb is killing a lot of them.  But they insist it's all lies.

In the meantime, the article tells us the numbers have gone wobbly again in both Israel and UK, which nobody knows yet what that means, but there are small upticks in the numbers again.

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Vaccines have changed the game in the UK for sure. Before they arrived, we were at a peak of about 1200 deaths a day! After vaccines its more like 80. Delta or not, if you have vaccines the death rate is dropping hugely.

We are just talking about a 10% difference in vaccination rate though. 

But maybe the anti-vax/mask folks in the US are really effective at spreading covid-19.

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, Zorral said:

While here, stupidly, leaders said those of us vaccinated no longer needed to mask or worry ... which meant EVERYBODY took off their masks and gathered indoors with friends and family.  Of which vaccinated EVERYBODY is less than half, and in big swathes of the they are proudly almost entirely unvaccinated.  So here we are.  That interview in the NY Magazine [free to read] I linked to above, is pretty disheartening for the US, where we do all things Freedumb and Individual and the hell with it if my freedumb kills you, my kids or myself.  And right now their freedumb is killing a lot of them.  But they insist it's all lies.

In the meantime, the article tells us the numbers have gone wobbly again in both Israel and UK, which nobody knows yet what that means, but there are small upticks in the numbers again.

Numbers haven’t gone ‘wobbly’ in the UK what ever that means 

[maarsen]

Evolution in humans has never stopped. In prior pandemics,a lucky genetic difference separated those that lived and those that died. Now the selection method seems to be based on the ability to read and understand the basics of epidemiology and/or science. If you have the mindset, however aquired, of distrust of science, then I guess you will be on the wrong side of a great filter. One can only hope this improves the species.

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I kinda hope it is a combination of people going too late to the hospital because they don't believe in Covid-19 and because health care is really expensive in the US.

I mean numbers from European countries that had infection spikes don't look that bad. Most countries still have some covid-19 rules though and many are ramping them up again.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me though - if that were true, we'd see about the same hospitalization rates - but that doesn't appear to be the case.

I suspect that the real thing is that the testing is just WAAAAY low and we're getting massive hits, and we aren't measuring test positivity nearly well enough. 

14 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

We are just talking about a 10% difference in vaccination rate though. 

But maybe the anti-vax/mask folks in the US are really effective at spreading covid-19.

It's a 10% rate in aggregate difference, but a  MASSIVE difference in region. We go from almost 80% vaccination rate in some places to just above 30 in others. I don't think that the UK is that heterogeneous in vaccination because the US has to be fucking special as always

[Kalbear]

Yeah, looks like it. From here, aggregated the test positivity rate is 11% overall in the US:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

Florida isn't on there, but Georgia is - and has a 21% rate:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/georgia

I appreciate Alabama's, which has a 308% positivity rate thanks to presumably some bad data entry

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/alabama

[JGP]

Both my daughters [one is only 11] got their second Pfizer yesterday, so feeling better about letting them attend school in-person come September.

[Zorral]

Once again the fascists will have prevented intelligent, responsible people from celebrating Thanksgiving and the holidays together.  At least in climates like ours.  This realization hit today. I am very angry.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

A comment on mortality rates:

Mortality rates of 1-2% rely on the assumption that at no time during the outbreak is your medical system overwhelmed with patients. That's beds, Nurses, Doctors, machines that go "ping". As soon as you cross that threshold, you could see mortality rates in the low double digits, as we saw in the early days of the pandemic in northern Italy, New York, etc.

So is Delta more deadly? If it has the potential to pack ICU's more rapidly than previous variants, it certainly could be.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Huh. Well played Tallahassee's school superintendent.

https://www.rawstory.com/desantis-school-threatens-salaries-masks/

[Padraig]

1 hour ago, Kaligator said:

It's a 10% rate in aggregate difference, but a  MASSIVE difference in region. We go from almost 80% vaccination rate in some places to just above 30 in others. I don't think that the UK is that heterogeneous in vaccination because the US has to be fucking special as always

Yes.  That's why that article was a bit dumb.  Comparing the US to the Netherlands or the UK?  Stupid.

While herd immunity is probably a fantasy, there is still a critical mass to be reached to visibly slow down the spread of COVID.  Way too many parts of the US haven't reached that mark.  (It will be interesting to see what happens to places like Romania, which have terrible vaccination rates but Delta hasn't got on fire there yet).

And yes, the UK cases have started to increase again.  A little later than expected but hardly surprising.  It could be that people didn't gradually started behaving like "normal" immediately.  But as cases continued to decline, they were lulled into a false sense of security.  The Netherlands (or Spain) will be interesting comparators, as they haven't embraced the "no restriction" approach, and do actually have similar vaccination rates to the UK.  Cases are declining there for now.

Edited to add:  Delta is weird.  While cases have risen in Germany, it hasn't been over-run like France, the UK or Spain.  Its vaccination rate isn't better.  Maybe restrictions are higher?  Or better observed?  I don't really understand.  And Eastern/Central Europe is generally doing well.  The Czechs have seen declines over the last 3 weeks and their positivity rate is 0.5%.  But their vaccination rate is lower than the US!  ourorldindata says that 95% of their cases is Delta.

So I can honestly say, I can understand what is going on in the US and Western Europe but Eastern/Central Europe is very surprising.  (Canada to some degree too but its vaccination rate is very high).

And fatality rates.  While a lot lower than previously, they are very noticeable in many countries with high COVID rates.  I wouldn't be saying "success".