Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

No No No!

The unvaccinated are Covid positive and spreading the virus until they submit and get vaccinated. The vaccinated are saints and never get Covid.

Wait…

 

While I absolutely think there are vaccinated who are navigating this to an excessive safety point where they basically shut down. Many end up with this exact feeling of safety and human behavior changes and the next thing you have is Covid positive people out in public. Not malicious but…

 

Just stop with the asymptomatic nonsense. That “who” piece is from July 2020. If the asymptomatic spread this thing in a meaningful way natural immunity would be herd immunity at this point.

 

The omicron variant is likely to have picked up genetic material from another virus that causes the common cold in humans, according to a new preliminary study, prompting one of its authors to suggest omicron could have greater transmissibility but lower virulence than other variants of the novel coronavirus.

Researchers from Nference, a Cambridge, Mass.-based firm that analyzes biomedical information, sequenced omicron and found a snippet of genetic code that is also present in a virus that can bring about a cold. They say this particular mutation could have occurred in a host simultaneously infected by SARS-CoV-2, also known as the novel coronavirus, and the HCoV-229E coronavirus, which can cause the common cold. The shared genetic code with HCoV-229E has not been detected in other novel coronavirus variants, the scientists said.



Omicron possibly more infectious because it shares genetic code with common cold coronavirus, study says

 

I just read the same thing, but what's strange is South Africa has seen a spike in hospitalizations of kids under 5

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/03/omicron-covid-variant-delta-reinfection/


omicron 3 times more likely to cause reinfection.

 

Christ. This is never going to end.

 

actually that may not be that horrible. If natural immunity is robust, 3 times a low number ( normal reinfection) is still a low number.

 

This thing is heading endemic. Therapeutic treatment with next generation vaccines will be how it is fought going forward.

Stop telling people how they must live their lives the way you want them to. We have new drugs people can take to provide a potential therapeutic benefit (we really need to be better at explaining what these drugs are as people have a belief in what a good “vaccine” does and that would be to protect people for more than a couple months). We have new drugs that show very good results from a therapeutic standpoint if you get the virus vaccinated or unvaccinated but are expensive and not easy to administer. We have a new easy to administer therapeutic drug that is questionable on how good it works. We have a new easy to administer drug that is a little behind the other but is showing good data on its effectiveness.

A majority of the idiot public health officials we have really need to be replaced in order to regain confidence and trust in what they recommend. The majority of public health officials have been an abject disaster. I want to believe they are just incompetent but part of me believes they are just evil. A tunnel vision one size fits all approach is the antithesis of Medicine. Especially when it is quite clear there was an intent to ignore science in pushing a narrative. Then mandate people take a drug while continuing to ignore that science. These people have done so much damage to “science”.

 

I am not going to lie. It is really not clear to me how these folks in S Africa can be so sure when they have to use terms like "likely to be" and "strongly suspected" since they do not even have complete medical records on a large part of the population that they are analyzing.

I am not saying that they are wrong, but I am saying that they are extrapolating a lot more than I would be comfortable with.

 

what science, medical community, and stats, reflect; and should be obvious.

I think fortunately most of us are vaxed.

“in many areas in which the population is much more tightly packed and the coronavirus could transmit more easily — the story is far less grim. A big reason: widespread vaccination. Death rates are far below the national average in the most-vaccinated, often-urban areas.

Perhaps the most highly vaccinated large county in America, according to New York Times data, is Montgomery County, Md., just outside the District of Columbia. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 93 percent of those 12 and older there are fully vaccinated, compared to around 70 percent nationally. The number dying over the past week is eight times as high nationally — 3.4 per 1 million — as it is in Montgomery County — 0.4 per 1 million — even as Montgomery County is near some virus hotspots.

….that deaths in red counties are more than 50 percent higher than in blue counties.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/04/big-counties-are-proving-how-vaccination-works/

 

Off the vaccination subject the thing I like from this cherry pick of data from one week that gets more to the real issue with this virus…is the county they chose has a death rate right now of 2% 1,734 deaths among 85,482 cases.

montgomery county maryland covid cases - Google Search

The United States is 787K deaths among 49 million cases for a death rate of 1.6%.

Obesity in Montgomery County MD is 56.1%.

momtgomery county maryland obesity rate - Google Search

United States obesity is 42.4%.

I think a lot more can be drawn from the reality the obese are likely a much bigger issue to be concerned with verse picking one week of data to try and compare counties and the such to say people should take a new drug. And as a whole…I think red counties are likely more obese than blue counties if I were guessing.

 

You make a few good points in there. Here is where you lose me. The study shows zero benefit for people under 50 and zero benefits for cloth masks. We also don’t know if the increased social distancing that the mask group was encouraged to do was the main driver in the difference. That’s the issue. Regardless, since the vast, vast majority of masks used by people in the US are cloth masks then that shows that masks are basically just cosmetic theater.

 

Sorry but you make some assumptions here.
Unvaxxed may think it’s a threat but a very small one akin to a bad cold which for many it is.

The issue is for some it can be deadly.

 

Interesting.

People in pro-Trump areas nearly three times more likely to die from COVID-19: NPR analysis

Counties that went to Trump by a higher percentage had higher COVID-19 mortality rates and lower vaccination rates, with the rates lowering as Trump's vote share increases.

Liz Hamel, KFF's vice president of public opinion and survey research, told NPR that political affiliation is now the strongest indicator of someone's vaccination status.

"An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat," said Hamel. "If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is."

 

Does that look at obesity in those areas?
Certainly obesity and age are huge risk factors for COVID death.
Rural areas generally have a higher incidence of obesity.

 

You are assuming only rural areas voted for Trump?

 

Well, you can bet not as many young people voted for trump.

 

Rural areas voted for Trump in large proportions, that's been bellied about here for years. All those low educated hicks.

 

Case counts follow a very similar pattern. It does not appear to be primarily an issue of conversion from case to death but rather primarily a top of the funnel issue, although some small amount may have to do with the, on average, worse health in those counties. Those counties have much worse vaccination rates, which leads to higher case and higher death totals.