Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

It needs to be left up to show the character of the poster.

 

That poster and others.

 

Who the heck is deleting all the posts that rebuke a covid anti-vax conspiracy theorist? Such shame. Booooooo

 

Not to mention, you kindly came to the defense of the offending member a few weeks ago against what you viewed as unfair attacks.

People need to stop with the nazi imagery and comparisons. Not just inappropriate but there is a flippancy to it that makes it even worse.

 

Not directed at you, OK but . . . .

 

Always thought it was a right of passage to get jet injected.

 

Exactly. And since that time GR has called people "sheeple", accused doctors of murder and refuses to have a discussion or address refutations to his claims.

 

The article and the studies its based on raise some good points, but you should read further...

Here was another salient point:

Three issues come to mind raised in/by the article:

1. As pointed out in the article, oxygenation is not the only way to measure severity of illness. It might be sufficient as one such cause, but it doesn't preclude there being other conditions that can cause a serious hospitalization (which they didn't measure).

2. Also pointed out, the lack of uniformity across hospitals in what counts as serious is to correctly imply that we'd need to have a better baseline to standardize what counts or not otherwise the notion that the 40-50ish percent of alleged not-serious hospitalizations could be an undercount of serious hospitalizations...or an overcount of not-serious ones.

3. If admitted because someone has comorbidities that make covid an increased danger to their health or they were initially admitted for other reasons only to discover they had covid, in neither situation is the seriousness of covid negated and in neither must such cases be excluded from hospitalization counts. Rather, both speak to how serious covid can be for many people and both speak to getting #2 above right.

 

Researchers Say Some People Have Developed ‘Superhuman Immunity’ Against COVID-19 – CBS Dallas / Fort Worth (cbslocal.com)
Hybrid immunity, is when someone has had COVID-19 and the vaccine.

It provides people with antibodies from both.

Superhuman immunity starts off the same way, but that some people with particular genetics can develop even more immunity.

“There are some of us that have this super ability to be able to recover from infections, COVID being one of them, a little better than the general population,” said Archana Narayan, and Immunologist with North Texas Allergy & Asthma Associates.

Experts say it’s a rare phenomenon.

“It’s a descriptive term for an individual to generate very high amounts of neutralizing antibodies,” Dr. Mohanakrishnan Sathyamoorthy, Chair of Internal Medicine, TCU and UNTHSC.

Studies show that some folks may have hit the genetic jackpot, meaning their bodies can develop very high levels antibodies that neutralize the virus.

They are also capable of fighting off present and future variants of COVID-19.

 

Large study on "long covid" in children in the UK. The good news is no discernible difference from the those without covid to those with covid. This also takes into account Delta.



Technical article: Updated estimates of the prevalence of post-acute symptoms among people with coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK - Office for National Statistics

 

Fortunately hospitalization numbers are going down.

Overfilled ICUs put non-COVID patients' health at risk: "These are people suffering unnecessarily"

Nathaniel Osborn spent more than six hours in a Florida hospital's emergency room with his 12-year-old son Seth this past July. The two waited together as Seth's appendix ruptured, and there were no beds available. Despite Seth being in excruciating pain, doctors told Seth's family the hospital emergency room was overwhelmed with COVID patients.

"My wife was taken from the emergency room waiting room back into the observation rooms there, and she asked one of the nurses, 'What's going on? Why did we have to wait so long?' And the nurse rolled her eyes and said something to the effect of, 'Well, what do you think? We're slammed with COVID,'" Osborn told CBS News' Manuel Bojorquez.

Seth was eventually seen and recovered, but his situation is not uncommon. Across the nation, hospitals' emergency rooms are overfilled with mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients—putting everyone who needs healthcare in danger.

 

Exactly, and we've been doing that for a good long time. Of course these threads move along quickly and it's hard for us to catch everything.

 

Going to the source story provides more context.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/?utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_term=2021-09-13T18:49:45


From the study you could infer that covid hospitalizations are "over reported". But you have to dig in more to how they classify data and what it all means.

- they use VA data, which gives data consistency from prior periods, but may or may not be representative the whole population

-Within the data there are going to be some that happen to have tested positive but are there for something else, and that arguably does inflate the data. But at the same time, in their 40% they also include less severe covid, which they define as not being either intubated of oxygen level of 96. That's fine as a definition, but doesn't mean non severe cases are not serious or shouldnt be there. I think of an unvaxxed friend who was hospitalized for migraine level headaches (and she never had migraines before) and severe vomiting. AFAIK she wasn't intubated or excessively low oxygen. She was definitely sick enough to be there. So infering that non severe cases is over reporting the number is incorrect. And it isn't clear from the presentation how many of the 40% didn't meet the severe definition, and what percent had incidental covid and we're there for somethjng else, that was not exacerbated by the covid.

they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classifies that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.

So just because a case didn't meet the severe clinical definition doesn't mean those people didn't have serious covid related illness. "Mild" can still mean serious illness, just that you hadnt reached life threatening status....yet. Also I wonder if the fact that we treat covid better now from the start increases that number, which is actually a good thing.

Also there is a nugget in there that actually bodes well for the vaccinated:

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21.

You can infer from that the vaccine is providing more protection that the "severe" criteria indicated. If you admitted to the hospital and were vaccinated your outcome will be better.


One of the important implications of the study, these experts say, is that the introduction of vaccines strongly correlates with a greater share of COVID hospital patients having mild or asymptomatic disease. “It’s underreported how well the vaccine makes your life better, how much less sick you are likely to be, and less sick even if hospitalized,” Snyder said. “That’s the gem in this study.”

“People ask me, ‘Why am I getting vaccinated if I just end up in the hospital anyway?’” Griffin said. “But I say, ‘You’ll end up leaving the hospital.’” He explained that some COVID patients are in for “soft” hospitalizations, where they need only minimal treatment and leave relatively quickly; others may be on the antiviral drug remdesivir for five days, or with a tube down their throat. One of the values of this study, he said, is that it helps the public understand this distinction—and the fact that not all COVID hospitalizations are the same.


I think the conclusions that covid hospitalizations are "over reported" lacks context, and may actually lead you to incorrect conclusions as the Townhall write up intentionally does.

 

Mississippi Now No. 1 in COVID Deaths Per 100,000, Dethroning NJ

Mississippi now leads the nation in COVID-19 deaths per 100,000, usurping New Jersey, an early pandemic hotspot that until last week had held the title for 15 months. The Magnolia State claimed the unenviable title following a month in which the delta variant surge pushed hospitals to the point of collapse with coronavirus patient levels at all-time highs for both children and adults.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs predicted the state would exceed New Jersey earlier this month, shortly after Mississippi surpassed the nation’s earliest pandemic hotspot, New York, which now ranks third in COVID deaths per 100,000. But it did not have to happen, he stressed.

“In Mississippi, we’re complacent about being last, aren’t we? And if you see some folks out there, they’re saying this is inevitable, people are going to die, it’s not worth trying,” the state health officer said during a Sept. 3, 2021, Mississippi State Medical Association roundtable discussion. “That is a loser mentality, right?”

Since COVID-19 arrived in the Magnolia State in March 2020, the state’s COVID-19 deaths per 100,000, also known as the crude death rate, has climbed to 306 per 100,000 residents. New Jersey, now in second place, has reported 292 deaths per 100,000 residents, while New York, the nation’s earliest pandemic hotspot, has reported 269 COVID deaths per resident.

 

Louisiana just passed New York as well into third.

 

And to be clear- this is from the very beginning of covid, and most of NJ deaths were during the initial wave where the NE was hit really hard. As of right now in recent weeks NJ is among the better one in this state.

 

It's kind of impressive that anyone has been able to pass NY and NJ, considering most of their deaths were in that first early wave when we didn't know how to treat covid. The death rate now is less than a third of what it was in those early days. You have to really be trying hard to catch up with that kind of imbalance working against you.