Corona Virus: It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

[Kraken]

Geez Louise, I thought it was panic time when I heard our positivity rate is near 12%. Guess all those diners in the restaurant where I picked up takeout tonight have the right idea and I'm just a nervous Nellie with my mask and my hand sanitizer. Party on, fellow Massholes!

[Victoria Raverna]

Always nice to see NJ as #1 in the nation...with % positive tests via Johns Hopkins or here.

(1) NJ @ 87%
(2) DC @ 68%
(3) PA @63%

Good grief.

As a reminder:

Positivity Rate (or Percent Positive) is a useful measure of how much COVID-19 is spreading in a community. Positivity rate tells us the percent of COVID-19 tests that come back as positive out of all the tests that were taken in that time period. Positivity rate does not tell us how many people in the community are, or have been, sick with COVID-19, case rates or case numbers are a better reflection of that. Positivity rate may change depending on the number of people tested. If the same number or an increasing number of people are tested, we are even more confident that an increase in positivity rate is concerning. We are also often asked the difference between a case and a positive test result. Each time a test is performed, it becomes part of the calculation of positivity rate for that day. However, positive cases represent individual people, and are only counted once, regardless of how many positive tests are run.

We are testing more people now than ever before, so yeah. Trouble.

This is fairly easy to solve. Test fewer people and the news will be better.

Also, messaging seems to be working:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explor ... mon%20cold

https://trends.google.com/trends/explor ... %20endemic

Testing less people will not lower positivity rate. It is more likely to raise it.

[Smoove_B]

I guess we'll see tomorrow. Not sure what 4 states didn't report, but I'm confident we're over 600K reported today.

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1476754432348016643

U.S. COVID update: More than half a million new cases, shattering records in 25 states

- New cases: 587,564
- Average: 347,459 (+45,328)
- States reporting: 46/50
- In hospital: 89,851 (+5,558)
- In ICU: 18,077 (+500)
- New deaths: 1,407

[Isgrimnur]

[Smoove_B]

https://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1 ... 8762883093

21% of members of the NYPD were out sick Thursday in what outgoing Commissioner Dermot Shea said was the HIGHEST number of sick members he has seen in his career.

NYE in Times Square? Oh no, that's still happening.

[Zarathud]

As a nation, we’re taking the challenge to put the penny into the electrical socket. It’s stupid, but we’re not listening to reason anymore.

[UsulofDoom]

I guess we'll see tomorrow. Not sure what 4 states didn't report, but I'm confident we're over 600K reported today.

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1476754432348016643

U.S. COVID update: More than half a million new cases, shattering records in 25 states

- New cases: 587,564
- Average: 347,459 (+45,328)
- States reporting: 46/50
- In hospital: 89,851 (+5,558)
- In ICU: 18,077 (+500)
- New deaths: 1,407

Don't worry. We have that covered.
US birth rate.
A person is born approximately every 8.08 seconds

Number of people born per year: 3,900,750

Number of people born per day: 10,687

Number of people born per hour: 445

https://www.indexmundi.com/clocks/indic ... ted-states

[stessier]

This is fine, right? That last bar is ~8800.

[Smoove_B]

It's pretty clear - no matter what, we need to keep working. Schools and businesses must remain open. I can only assume 60 days from now we'll be reading various "That was not a good idea" OpEds from around the nation. But for now? It's fine.

[LawBeefaroni]

This is fine, right? That last bar is ~8800.

It's all good. You're just looking at the wrong charts.

Head down, carry on citizen.

[Smoove_B]

Head down, carry on citizen.

Next week is going to be lit

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1476964485743235073

New York state reports 76,555 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record

[malchior]

What's also nice is that this is turning out to be a bad flu season as well and flu vaccinations declined ~23-25%. Too bad we learned absolutely nothing during this pandemic.

[Isgrimnur]

CNN

One of the main circulating influenza viruses has changed and the current flu vaccines don't match it well any more -- an indication they may not do much to prevent infection, researchers reported Thursday. But they are still likely to prevent severe illness.

"From our lab-based studies it looks like a major mismatch," Scott Hensley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania who led the study, told CNN.

It's bad news for the vaccine, he said. Influenza vaccines protect against four different strains of the flu: H3N2, H1N1 and two strains of influenza B. Hensley's study only covers H3N2, but that happens to be the main circulating strain.
...
"Studies have clearly shown that seasonal influenza vaccines consistently prevent hospitalizations and deaths even in years where there are large antigenic mismatches," Hensley and colleagues wrote in a report posted online as a pre-print. It's not published in a peer reviewed journal.

"Influenza vaccinations will be crucial for reducing hospitalizations as SARS-CoV-2 and 2a2 H3N2 viruses co-circulate in the coming months."

[Smoove_B]

I'm not even going to mention the highly pathogenic avian influenza that's currently circulating in Europe. I'm sure it will be fine...

[Zaxxon]

What's also nice is that this is turning out to be a bad flu season as well and flu vaccinations declined ~23-25%. Too bad we learned absolutely nothing during this pandemic.

Oh, we learned quite a lot. Just not the things we wanted to learn.

[Grifman]

It's pretty clear - no matter what, we need to keep working. Schools and businesses must remain open. I can only assume 60 days from now we'll be reading various "That was not a good idea" OpEds from around the nation. But for now? It's fine.

I'm going to take a contrary view because it seems to me that you are just too narrowly focused and ignoring a lot of real life factors:

1) I think it's pretty clear that the public doesn't want any more lock downs or school closures. The number of people going out to restaurants, bars, stores, etc, despite warnings of Omicron pretty much confirms this. You can only demand of people what they are willing to submit to. So, yes, in a perfect public health world we would do more restriction-wise but the public just doesn't care in many ways. Vaccinated people feel relatively safe, while the unvaccinated never cared about the risk and never will. So who is left in the public to raise concerns? There is no longer any constituency for severe restrictions.

2) You are also ignoring the concern about public services. There's seems to be a definite concern about supply chains and essential services - fuel, groceries, etc. - being sustainable if strict quarantines are required Hence the reduction in the number of days quarantine required. If those breakdown, then we are going to have a lot bigger and more immediate problem than covid. Cold hungry people aren't going to care about a virus that probably won't make them sick or kill them.

3) I think sometime public health officials are too narrowly focused - it's great to have the answers, but we live in a world where expert advice is no longer assumed to be expert (yeah, I know it's crazy, but 75% of Republicans think Trump was cheated out of being re-elected despite the reassurances of experts so there you have it). As one public health official noted, they had sort of forgotten the human factor - that whatever policies they came up with needed to be sold to the public, that they had not realized the extent that the internet would allow the spread of lies and misinformation. Now I'm not sure how you solve that, or if it can be solved given the state of mind of a large section of the US public, but certainly more effort was needed here.

So yeah, we're in a crappy situation, largely of our own making, and it goes a long way back. Trump obviously was a public health disaster, and was concerned only about how the pandemic affected his re-election chances. The Biden admin is somewhat better, but they obviously staked everything on vaccines, which ignored the large number of people who were against them, and also never saw (though they should have) the appearance of new variants and how they might change the equation. (I think that explains why they were so unprepared for testing/masking (N95's for everyone!)).

So yeah, in an ideal world, the government would seek additional restrictions/lockdowns if necessary, and the public would accept them. But that world doesn't exist - it barely existed when we first got hit hard with covid, and it certainly doesn't exist now. At this point all we can do is just muddle through and hope for the best.

See these polls on covid for some interesting and enlightening public opinion:

https://morningconsult.com/views-on-the-pandemic/

That one of the polls show that less than 30% of the public thinks covid is a "severe" public health issue only reinforces my point. Nobody is going to accept lockdowns and closures if they don't see covid as a "severe" public health problem.

[Smoove_B]

Here's the thing Grifman, it's not that I (or public health at large) is unrealistic. We aren't calling for lockdowns or closures. Just like everyone seems to be focused on life/death with COVID-19, we don't just have two options - fully open vs lockdown. We can enact all kinds of plans and policies on a continuum. We can use data to make decisions about what is appropriate and what's not. Or we can let business and the economy drive decisions. Because lord knows businesses in America are always looking out for the health and safety of workers and consumers.

What we've been saying is that if we don't enact polices to aggressively limit spread, we're going to be experiencing shutdowns (i.e. "soft closures") in all industries because too many people are going to be sick and unable to work. It's already happening, at least here in my part of America. Random store closures. Urgent Care centers. Repair technicians. Delivery drivers. Gas stations.

We are actively encouraging spread right now under the guise of "it's just like the flu, you'll be fine". Ignoring kids that haven't been vaccinated. Ignoring immunocompromised people with diminished response. Ignoring all the people that have only received 2 or 1 shots.

We have collectively given up and are now seeming just shrugging and going with the let 'er rip strategy that was originally suggested by the Trump administration back in the Spring of 2020.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everything is going to be super. For once in 2+ years, I'd love to be wrong. I'd love to stop believing the people that have repeatedly predicted exactly what was going to happen when we followed a certain path. It hasn't happened yet.

[gilraen]

We are actively encouraging spread right now under the guise of "it's just like the flu, you'll be fine".

The thing is, maybe eventually it will be "like the flu" in the sense that it will be dangerous to very young or immunocompromised but mostly people will just live with it. But I don't understand how people can say that now when hospitals are filling up with COVID patients, even some who are vaccinated. Last I checked, healthcare systems aren't on the brink of collapse every flu season. So sick of hearing these arguments "COVID is here to stay", "we need to learn to live with it", "why are you canceling NHL/NBA/whatever games, let them play if they don't have any symptoms!" etc.

Someone who decides that if they die of COVID, it's their time to go and they want to just "live their life" should at least have the courtesy to die at home and not take up an ICU bed and a ventilator.

[Smoove_B]

Right, maybe eventually - 5, or 10 years from now - COVID-19 will be like the flu. Or maybe all this uncontrolled spread is going to just encourage it to mutate into something even worse. There's no biological "law" that says it needs to mutate into something that is less harmful to us. All the virus wants is to replicate; we're just fuel.

So above and beyond the preventable deaths that are happening right now think about the kids that are going to lose a parent or grandparent. Think about the millions of people that are going to develop a chronic condition as a result of exposure, some of whom are going to be knocked out of the job market short or long term.

I've been trying to process all this for the last week as the numbers continue to rise and it's overwhelming. I don't know how to be part of a society that is apparently ok with all this.

[malchior]

I've been trying to process all this for the last week as the numbers continue to rise and it's overwhelming. I don't know how to be part of a society that is apparently ok with all this.

That last bit is what is killing me. We have a society that essentially wants to wish away biology. A million plus people will be dead and it isn't a severe community health risk? I don't know how we can think of ourselves as the greatest much less something we shouldn't be anything but ashamed of.

[Smoove_B]

But you don't have to take my word for it:

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1477023767721304068

"Over the next three to four weeks, we're going to see the number of cases in this country rise so dramatically, we're going to have a hard time keeping daily life operating," Dr. Osterholm says.

But few deaths, so it's all good. I'm aware he's saying the CDC made the right call here, but understand this call was made because of failures for the last 6+ months. It's like saying we should just let the building burn at this point because we didn't add sprinklers or pave a road so the fire department could help out when the problem started.

It really is like someone said, "Well, testing is really problematic right now - both in what's available and how long it takes to turn around results so what if we just get rid of that testing requirement? That's the problem here, so we can eliminate it."

[UsulofDoom]

Maybe this will help.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/he ... and-cases/


You or your friends and family have less than .4 % to die from covid. below is your rick of dying from cancer.

Males Risk of developing Risk of dying from

All invasive sites 40.14 % 21.34 %



https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-ba ... ancer.html

[Smoove_B]

Again, (for the 37th time) this isn't just about death and it certainly isn't just about my personal health risk.

I feel like...maybe you haven't been reading my posts on COVID-19 over the last (checks watch) two years.

[malchior]

It also doesn't make a lick of sense. Lifetime risk of dying of cancer shouldn't be compared to an acute risk. I wish we could all agree both are really bad and impactful in different ways.

[Smoove_B]

I've been reassured they are very mild hospitalizations (again).

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1477024693966323716

Number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 tops 90,000, highest since September

[RunningMn9]

It’s not intended to be serious. It’s just intended to deflect and obfuscate, for reasons that have nothing to do with public health.

[Alefroth]

Maybe this will help.

Help with what exactly?

I'm thinking it's to help you feel better about being selfish, but that can't be it.

[malchior]

I've been reassured they are very mild hospitalizations (again).

Recognizing other people's suffering is much too inconvenient. It might lead to wearing a mask. The horror! I say that case in particular because I saw a model that indicated that just improving mask adherence from estimated current 36% to even 80% might save 25-50K lives over the next 3 months. But that's too much to ask a nation chock full of assholes.

[Max Peck]

According to the emergency broadcast that just scared me out of a year's growth, the province of Quebec is celebrating New Year's Eve by imposing a curfew tonight.

[malchior]

https://twitter.com/AdrienneTaren/statu ... 6260302893

[Blackhawk]

But few deaths, so it's all good.

Until, as others have also commented, all of the ICU rooms are full, all of the hospitals are out of staff because they're sick or just exhausted from overwork (I see this in Michelle every day), and people start dying of other things as a direct result.

This is not the time to have a heart attack. You'll get to the ER and have to wait in line. But hey, COVID didn't kill you (except that it was the reason you didn't survive.)

[Grifman]

I've been trying to process all this for the last week as the numbers continue to rise and it's overwhelming. I don't know how to be part of a society that is apparently ok with all this.

That last bit is what is killing me. We have a society that essentially wants to wish away biology. A million plus people will be dead and it isn't a severe community health risk? I don't know how we can think of ourselves as the greatest much less something we shouldn't be anything but ashamed of.

Here's the thing, look at this chart of covid deaths by age:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/119 ... by-age-us/

Half of those deaths are 75 years or older. Of the remainder of deaths, over 75% of those are older than 50. And the population over 50 only makes up 34% of the US population. People see this as a disease largely of the late middle aged and old - and for the most part, they are right. Less than 55k people under age 50 have died from covid (yes, there's long covid but most people for better or worse are focused on deaths). Throw in the people over 50 who are Republican/anti-vaxxers and you have a huge proportion that believe that the disease really doesn't impact them. And the thing is, this isn't just a US problem. There have been huge protests in Germany, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia among others.

The simple fact is, and as perverse as this may sound, Covid isn't deadly enough. It is deadly enough to be a threat to the public as a whole but not deadly enough to really impact the decision making of many people, as it's mortality is very stratified such that large segments of the population are relatively low risk. There is a certain sector of society that is "wishing away biology" (Republicans/anti-vaxxers over 50) but for most people under 50, this really isn't that big of a threat. In their minds, they can live with it.

In a way, this is a "perfect" disease. It is very contagious, but is mostly fatal to only the older portion of the of the population. The younger population can continue to do what they want to without much threat, while the disease propagates freely without wiping out it's hosts.

I will say this - Covid has revealed that there is a lot of selfishness in the US AND a lot of other nations. Too many people are focused on their inconveniences (wearing masks, not being able to party, go to restaurants, go on vacations, socical distancing, etc). In many ways, "freedom" is just another word for "selfishness".

[malchior]

The simple fact is, and as perverse as this may sound, Covid isn't deadly enough. It is deadly enough to be a threat to the public as a whole but not deadly enough to really impact the decision making of many people, as it's mortality is very stratified such that large segments of the population are relatively low risk. There is a certain sector of society that is "wishing away biology" (Republicans/anti-vaxxers over 50) but for most people under 50, this really isn't that big of a threat. In their minds, they can live with it.

Totally agree. And it is based on something I harp on. People are terrible at risk analysis. They don't think it can happen to them or recognize that long-term impacts are unknown and could be affecting them already. They also don't understand or more accurately care to understand the externalized costs of their actions and how it impacts other people. And that goes beyond COVID but in COVID it is crystal clear. People feel unbridled entitlement to wave their asshole flag like a badge of honor.

I will say this - Covid has revealed that there is a lot of selfishness in the US AND a lot of other nations.

It is true to an extent but we are exceptional. When I talk to people who live overseas I always seem to get a lot of questions about what is happening here - my old boss is in the Hague for instance. He watched the riots there (right outside his apartment complex) near the Den Haag Centraal a couple of months ago. Even then they were tiny. He isn't seeing anything like what we are dealing with and said people are being pretty decent in the current lockdown. I'm somewhat jealous that he got out of this insane asylum.

[Grifman]

Looks like the peak of Omicron in late January will be twice what the current record peak is now:

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/147 ... 05952?s=21

[Unagi]

Just reporting my piece of the anecdotal narrative....

My older sister, 53, lives in Montclair NJ. Not sure if that's near any of our fine NJ folks here...

Anyhow, she caught Covid much earlier in the pandemic. She was sick at home for about a week... She's fully vacinated and boosted - and she just now found out that she's tested positive again. (she feels just tired, with a cough and runny nose)...

My 81-year-old mother nearly went out to stay with her (and her family) for the holidays, but my sister waved her off because all of her kids were pending covid results and waiting to hear if other friend's covid tests came back positive, etc...

[stimpy]

I was with someone today that took a test they bought from Walgreens.
They test themselves and come up negative.

Here's the part I dont get.
There are 3 possible results.
Positive
Negative
Invaild

There are 2 lines on the test, a C and a T.
So........................if the test reads a solid line on C, it's negative.
If the test reads a solid line on T, invalid.
Solid lines on both? Positive.

Would it have been THAT hard to NOT make the negative test line a C?
There has to be people out there that dont read the directions, see a solid line by C and thinks that's a positive for Covid.
And the directions are very loose with the nose swab. I mean.....do you dig around in there deep and hard?
It kinda says how far to stick it in, but it just says to rotate it. How many people are going to just rotate it in the center, not hitting any of the sides.

This is the best we could come up with?

[Alefroth]

I don't know what test you are getting, but the Abbot Binax ones are perfectly clear in results and instructions.

[stimpy]

It was called On The Go or some such and from Walgreens

[Grifman]

The projection in the US is that we are going to go from an estimated 1.5 million cases/day to 3 million by the end of the month, which will mean about 60 to 70 million people sick. By default we are going to go into staggered "lockdowns" not by govt decree but by medical necessity - tens of millions of people will be sick and unable to work. Already several restaurants in my city have temporarily closed due to staff being sick and 20% of the NYC police force is out sick as noted above. Deliveries will not be made, shelves will not be stocked. I strongly suggest that everyone make sure that they have about two to three weeks of food stocked up and that you keep your gas tank full. The next month is going to be tough for everyone, even those that don't get sick.

[RunningMn9]

It’s a good thing it’s not a community health risk!