COVID 46 - Please disperse, nothing to see here!

[The Anti-Targ]

So, a study of deliberately infecting people with SARS-COV-2 has made some findings, one that perhaps some instinctively would have said sounds like common sense, the other perhaps counter to what people think would make common sense:

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They found the virus is "present at significantly higher [levels] in the nose than the throat", a finding they said provides "clear evidence that emphasises the critical importance of wearing face coverings over the nose as well as the mouth".

Not that I encourage anyone to go out and berate people who are hanging their noses over their masks. Rather I think the message is to take a wide berth around such people. Basically they are as good (or as bad) as not wearing a mask at all.

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found that, despite what most people have been told, viral shedding and transmissibility occur at high levels when a person is infected regardless of whether they have severe or mild symptoms.

Perhaps less aligned with common sense, but unless otherwise proven it would always be best to assume people are highly infectious regardless of symptoms. The one thing that would tend to reduce transmission in mild cases would be if people are not coughing and sneezing they are aerosolising less and aerosols are not being ejected as far.

Also while not quantifying the actual infectious dose the study has suggested that a the virus content of a single infected droplet is enough.

Study published last week in the journal Nature Medicine, Researchers from University College London Hospital, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, among others.

 

 

 

[Zorral]

NYC has been the first car in the covid surge train -- with the exceptions of 2020's summer midwestern Sturgis, South Dakota biker con-tsunami -- and last summer's Delta, vaccine and mask mandate blockade.  BA.2, however, here we accelerate every day, as we've done away with vaccination and mask mandates and every other form of public safety.  Even as our local media every day tell us our numbers are going up, what we might possibly do to protect ourselves since the powers that pee on us all have chosen to ignore the overwhelming fact that covid is not over, but rollin', rollin', rollin'.

"America Is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave
The United States could be in for a double whammy: a surge it cares to neither measure nor respond to, by Katherine J. Wu"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/ba2-omicron-variant-covid-surge/629474/

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If the United States has been riding a COVID-19 ’coaster for the past two-plus years, New York and a flush of states in the Northeast have consistently been seated in the train’s front car. And right now, in those parts of the country, coronavirus cases are, once again, going up. The rest of America may soon follow, now that BA.2—the more annoying, faster-spreading sister of the original Omicron variant, BA.1—has overtaken its sibling to become the nation’s dominant version of SARS-CoV-2.

Technologically and immunologically speaking, Americans should be well prepared to duel a new iteration of SARS-CoV-2, with two years of vaccines, testing, treatment, masking, ventilation, and distancing know-how in hand. Our immunity from BA.1 is also relatively fresh, and the weather’s rapidly warming. In theory, the nation could be poised to stem BA.2’s inbound tide, and make this variant’s cameo our least devastating to date.

But theory, at this point, seems unlikely to translate into practice. As national concern for COVID withers, the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing. Community test sites are closing, and even the enthusiasm for at-home tests seems to be on a serious wane; even though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a new deal on domestic pandemic funding, those patterns could stick. Testing and case reporting are now so “abysmal” that we’re losing sight of essential transmission trends, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. “It’s so bad that I could never look at the data and make any informed choice.” Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s impacting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded.

Read: America is about to test how long “normal” can hold

We can’t react to a wave we don’t see coming. “I keep thinking back to this idea of If we don’t measure it, it won’t happen,” says Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University. (As President Donald Trump once put it, “If we stop testing, we’d have fewer cases.”) In reality, “it’s very well happening, and we just don’t see it yet.” There is still no guarantee that the next wave is nigh—but if it is, the U.S. is poorly positioned to meet it. Americans’ motivational tanks are near empty; the country’s stance has, for months, been pretty much whatevs. The next wave may be less a BA.2 wave, and more a so what? wave—one many Americans care little to see, because, after two years of crisis, they care so little to respond.

Colloquially, epidemiologically, a wave is a pretty squishy term, a “know it when you see it” notion that gets subjective, fast. “There is no technical definition,” says C. Brandon Ogbunu, a mathematical modeler studying infectious-disease dynamics at Yale. And with COVID-19, there’s no consensus among experts on exactly when waves begin or end, or how sharp or tall one must be to count.

A reasonable delineation for a wave might involve an unexpected deviation from a baseline low—a sudden and sustained uptick in cases that eventually trends back down. That concept might seem intuitive, and yet it’s rife with assumptions: Unexpected, baseline, sudden, sustained—all of these require prior intel on how a disease typically behaves, says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers have spent decades building those knowledge bases for diseases like the flu. But “we don’t know what ‘normal’ conditions for COVID-19 are going to look like yet,” he told me.

That makes the start of a wave tough to identify even when testing data abound; no single inflection point guarantees a shift from not a wave to definitely a wave.  ...

 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Our Health chief has announced his retirement. Signalled last year he'd be retiring once he thought the country was in a good position wrt the pandemic, ie not likely to have to go into any emergency situation. IMO he's done a mostly brilliant job, though I had a couple of bones to pick with him very early on when he initially said, with some certainty, that pre-symptomatic spread wasn't a thing a day or so after international media was clearly reporting that it was. And he was dismissive of the value of wearing masks, and did not u-turn on that soon enough.

But more importantly he announced that at his farewell party he would be singing The Cure's 'Friday I'm in Love' on the karaoke machine. So +1 respect.

[Luzifer's right hand]

On 4/5/2022 at 4:05 AM, kiko said:

They loosened the mask rules in schools here. With the surprising result that now 15 of 26 kids in the class of my youngest daughter is home with covid. Who saw that coming?

So I'm stuck with her and my wife in the bedroom to leave the house to my older kids. The oldest one is in the middle of her graduation so we really try to not infect her. My youngest insists on wearing masks 24/7 now. Ever tried to sleep with fever and your mask on? I did and horribly failed so far.

Germany is going into full spreading mode with ending quarantine at the end of the month. It will still be "recommended" but that is only relevant for people with jobs that are home office or are part of the managing caste.

The lower castes will be forced to work infected which can be unwise if you have a taxing job even if you get no symptoms.

But that is a sacrifice the elite is willing to make as the memes goes as long as the economy runs and everybody gets infected.

[Impmk2]

On 4/5/2022 at 12:38 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

So, a study of deliberately infecting people with SARS-COV-2 has made some findings, one that perhaps some instinctively would have said sounds like common sense, the other perhaps counter to what people think would make common sense:

Had a read of this paper a few days ago. Found it interesting but there's a few limitations which should be kept in mind:

1) This study was done in early 2021 with an immunologically naive cohort.
2) They used the commonly circulating virus in the UK in early 2020 - almost certainly OG Wuhan
3) This was done on a very young cohort (20-30 year olds from memory).
4) Small sample size (36, of which ~18 became infected)

So I'd perhaps be somewhat cautious is over-interpreting the results, especially on to Omicron which can in some ways can be quite distinct.

 

On 4/5/2022 at 12:38 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Also while not quantifying the actual infectious dose the study has suggested that a the virus content of a single infected droplet is enough.

So they're actually recommending upping the inoculation for any future challenge trials. It wasn't sufficient for about ~50% of the cohort to become infected at all.

[Padraig]

59 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

The lower castes will be forced to work infected which can be unwise if you have a taxing job even if you get no symptoms.

A company can tell somebody to come to work if they have COVID but feel fine?  Yikes.

[Which Tyler]

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

But more importantly he announced that at his farewell party he would be singing The Cure's 'Friday I'm in Love' on the karaoke machine. So +1 respect.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

4 hours ago, Padraig said:

A company can tell somebody to come to work if they have COVID but feel fine?  Yikes.

Without mandatory quarantine that is how it is going to go. Most people need something official not a recommendation to be able to stay at home from work.

Edit: I just read that the German health minister backpaddled after massive criticism.

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/lauterbach-u-turns-voluntary-covid-quarantine-admitting-mistake

They will still reduce quarantine time to 5 days without the need for a test. None of the people I know had an acceptable value when they tried to tests themselves out of quarantine after 5 days here. Time will tell if it works out.

[Padraig]

12 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Without mandatory quarantine that is how it is going to go. Most people need something official not a recommendation to be able to stay at home from work.

True.  An obvious flaw.  If quarantine isn't mandatory then you need to make it illegal to tell people to come to work despite them having COVID.  Glad they changed their minds.

Anyhow, the latest wave in Europe doesn't seem to have been terrible (in so far as the fatality rate seems to be lower than the previous wave), although it put even more pressure on hospitals than the previous wave.  Given the last 2 years, lets hope summer will be more relaxed for them.  But you wouldn't be sure of anything!

The wave in Europe may be slightly reassuring to the US but there are enough differences between the 2 areas to be very wary.

[Zorral]

I don't know whether this should go in the Covid thread or the US Political thread.

More than 200,000 kids have lost a parent or caregiver to Covid. Efforts to help them have been haphazard.
“If a child has lost a parent, someone needs to show up at that doorstep right away — and I mean right away,” one professor of pediatrics said.

This advice ... can be iffy, depending on circumstances.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost-parent-caregiver-covid-efforts-help-haphazard-rcna16140

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.... With no standardized system to capture which children have lost mothers, fathers and other important adults in their lives, Nelson added, kids can easily fly under the radar. 

When Cindy Dawkins, 50, a single mother in Boynton Beach, Florida, died of Covid in August, leaving behind four children, no one from the hospital or the city called, her kids said. They wouldn’t have known what to do if it weren’t for a family friend.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to turn down getting help,” Dawkins’ oldest child, Jenny Burrows, 24, said. “You’re not talking about adults that are losing someone. You’re talking about kids who don’t know how to navigate through the world, yet they lost the person, or one of the people, that are meant to help them.”

The Covid funeral assistance program is not exclusively for grieving children. It has reached a wide swath of people who have lost family members to Covid: FEMA told NBC News it has given out over $1.8 billion in reimbursement for funeral expenses to more than 285,000 people and said it is working to raise awareness about the benefit, particularly in underserved communities.

However, it was not until Wednesday that the White House announced an initiative specifically for such children as part of the administration’s new Covid-19 preparedness plan. 

Few details were shared on what was envisioned beyond continuing to provide funeral expense assistance and “further develop a bereavement response to support children and families,” including trauma and grief-informed services. It will use existing funding, a White House official told NBC News. ....

 

It's important to recall the first 140,000 orphans came before vaccines were available.  200,000 orphans is trhe numbewhat They Said in March.  It's only the third month of 2022. Those orphans need and should be cared for by some federal financial plan.  However, Dickinsian conditions for these orphas leap into our minds' eye, considering how much money is involved, which clearly there's little to no oversight over.  Considering how much fraud has committed by so many already, getting Covid Assistance / Loans they did not qualify for -- often for a  bogus business.

We had more covid deaths AFTER vaccines, than before. And we're at more than the million mark, if all those unknowns are included.

[HoodedCrow]

If nobody died of Covid, then there are no orphans.( eyeroll)

Ron DeSantis produces anti gay legislation, and Betsy DeVos is all over him with money. Of course, I’ve heard that DeVos wants to knee cap public schools so that she can profit from bigoted private schools. 

[LongRider]

1 hour ago, HoodedCrow said:

Of course, I’ve heard that DeVos wants to knee cap public schools so that she can profit from bigoted private schools.

Orphans can't pay for school though.  Guess Ron & Betsy will just have to come up with a work program for those pesky penniless orphans.

[The Anti-Targ]

A minor update on death stats here

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Of the 51 deaths that have been officially coded as due to COVID-19, 4 occurred more than 28 days after testing positive. In addition, COVID-19 has been coded as contributing to 8 deaths. Of the deaths that occurred within 28 days, 2 have been ruled as not related to COVID-19 and 369 deaths are yet to be classified.

Previously it was 43/4/2. So that's only an extra 12 deaths officially coded in relation to COVID infection. Probably most are still pre-omicron, so the proportionality between cause/contributory/incidental in these figures probably won't reflect the proportions for the vast majority of the deaths reported to date which have been during the omicron wave; and those that are still to come of course.

[Larry of the Lawn]

 

Lol they're not even trying anymore.  

[Heartofice]

I'm surprised there has been little discussion of what is happening in Shanghai. From what I'm seeing the Chinese authorities have basically locked down the entire city, to an extreme degree, not letting people leave their houses. I've seen interviews of people put into detention centres for weeks who are unable to leave. 

Food is delivered to residents and they can only pick it up at certain times, at which point the food might have gone off. 

People are screaming out of the windows of their apartments, all the while authorities blast propaganda messages telling them to keep quiet and stay off social media.

This is the stuff the anti vaxx crowd was scared would happen in the West.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-61019975

[BigFatCoward]

33 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

This is the stuff the anti vaxx crowd was scared would happen in the West.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-61019975

Surely if you are scared of this you would be pro vax, so it wasn't necessary. 

 

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Surely if you are scared of this you would be pro vax, so it wasn't necessary. 

 

Yeah exactly. What is up with vaccination in China then? You'd think that if you are an authoritarian country the one thing you should be able to do easily is force everyone to get a vaccine. 

[BigFatCoward]

45 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah exactly. What is up with vaccination in China then? You'd think that if you are an authoritarian country the one thing you should be able to do easily is force everyone to get a vaccine. 

Maybe they know something we don't and there's a new and improved super variant around the corner. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

54 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Maybe they know something we don't and there's a new and improved super variant around the corner. 

It has been suggested for a while that the vaccines the Chinese used are not very effective afaik.

They also vaccinated differently than the west with starting with people who work instead of vulnerable groups. Many countries in Asia did that. Might have worked if there was a vaccine with sterile immunity.

New Zealand seems to be a success at least until now but thay used western vaccines and vaccinated vulnerable people first. Japan used western vaccines too but I dunno how they vaccinated from an age point of view.

[The Anti-Targ]

There are 5 eligible age demographics in NZ below 95% double vaxed: 5-11s, 12-17s(>951st dose), 25-29(almost 95% first dose), 45-49, and 55-59. All other than the 5-11 age demo are >90%. Among the adult demographics I wonder if those lesser vaccinated age demographics are more represented in the conspiracy/anti-vax groups than the other adult demographics. The 45-49s are the least vaccinated adult age demographic, it really stands out, even though the difference is only 4 or 5%.

I'm sure the anti-vax and anti-mandate people are afraid of COVID measures in the west getting to the extremes that they are in China. But there was never any danger of that actually happening. Such people are just completely out of touch with reality.