COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[100% pro-life no matter what]

According to covidestim.org, the Rt is now below 1 in every state except Tennessee. It's down to 0.29 in Utah, 0.31 in Rhode Island, and 0.4 or lower in a host of other states.

Tennessee only reports data once a week, so the data is pretty old at this point.  Would guess its past peak in TN as well.

And, sure enough, this week's update shows cases beginning a sharp decline in Tennessee.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

This thread (and Twitter replies) sometimes feels like a different planet.  Masks are uncommon enough here that I do a double-take on the rare occasion I see one.  The grocery store is the only place you see them, and it's even a minority there.  Apart from a vague understanding of things being different elsewhere, the Delta and- especially- Omicron waves have felt culturally a lot like the 2009 swine flu.  You know that people are getting sick, but probably don't know anyone who has been seriously ill*, and don't think too much about it.

*I'll be honest- I don't know a single person who has had anything worse than the seasonal flu from any variant of covid.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Why remove vax mandates? Mask mandates I get, but vax mandates aren't at all interfering with anyone's lives.

This blows my mind. Vaccine mandates force people to get an injection (and forced me to take time off work due to the side effects), and to be enforced requires checking of vax cards and IDs or scanning QR codes, effectively adding a layer of "papers please" government surveillance everywhere. And you're arguing that mask mandates are interfering with people's lives when vaccine mandates don't? Masks actually make it HARDER for the government to track your actions!

The anti-vax, pro-mask left strikes again

I'm so anti-vaccine that last April I spent hours sitting on tracker sites trying to find open appointments in 3 states, and last fall I got a booster before I was even supposed to get one. I believe in defenses in depth and the vaccine is much better than nothing. But to say that the vaccine mandate is a frictionless mitigation that doesn't affect daily life, when it involves getting an injection that essentially causes COVID for a day, and adds a huge layer of "papers please" surveillance everywhere, while the mask mandate is a cumbersome mitigation that substantially affects daily life, is like saying the sun rises in the west. I support vaccine mandates, but there is a quite strong argument against vaccine mandates on privacy grounds, while the argument against mask mandates is "they look funny" and "they feel uncomfortable". There's a reason vaccine mandates run 10 points behind mask mandates in every poll, multiple Democratic politicians have openly criticized vaccine mandates as unjust while none have criticized mask mandates like that, and all 50 states have had a mask mandate.

The last part is completely untrue.  Several red states never had statewide mask mandates.  Tennessee never did (my county technically did for a few months, but it was never really enforced).

[100% pro-life no matter what]

https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1491412978700361734?t=e5lmMhfBeNA9Y9wu...

Whether you believe this is the right time or not, this should be the end goal. But how much difference would changing this rule make in the US, especially with people not being tested for Omicron due to its lesser symptoms?

An underrated part of this is not so much people who test positive and then don't quarantine, but people who intentionally don't get tested when they have mild colds so they have plausible deniability not to quarantine.  How many people with slight colds intentionally avoid getting tested because they don't want to quarantine?

[100% pro-life no matter what]

What even is long Covid? We need some substantiation research into the occurrence, and what we know now isn’t sufficient to make those types of calls.

Long covid is, technically, one or more symptoms that lasts some amount of time (I believe three months.)  The problem is, this is so vague that it renders the term meaningless--if you have depression, any sort of viral illness is going to make those symptoms worse, so those who already have depression or other similar disorders will obviously be more tired for months after. But as fatigue is one of the covid symptoms, by the definitions put forth they'd be counted as having long covid. Similar for people with allergies that might have a persistent cough afterwards.

I think I saw a study that showed that the only statistically significant correlation post-covid symptom was persistent loss of smell.  And, obviously, that's much less common with newer variants.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

https://twitter.com/JoePajak/status/1494670238578884614

I recovered from Covid in December. I have none of that.

Long Covid is just propaganda.

People will pull up anything they can to get Biden to send everyone 2,000 dollar checks until covid is eradicated off earth.

Half the stuff on that list I had beforehand. It's worth asking how many people might have ended up with anxiety as a result of the pandemic itself and got worse when they got covid (worrying about the outcome. Anxiety can make you hyperaware of things you may have paid little attention to otherwise.

There was a study that found that the only statistically-significant correlation between covid infection and later symptoms was loss of smell.  And that's very uncommon with Omicron.  The rest of the "long covid" stuff is a faulty correlation of either people blaming covid for something (like fatigue) that maybe they mildly had anyway or even purely psychological due to an expectation of that symptom.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

So, could this be the end of covid? Cases in my town went from 362 to 21 over the course of a month.

Covid will never be eradicated, but it wouldn't surprise me if we're heading for another period like late April through early July of 2021 where the virus retreated so far as to be basically forgotten about for a little while.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1496364357814476802

Interesting theory, though this goes against my belief that COVID was around as early as late 2018.

There is nothing to suggest that covid-19 was around in 2018.  Coronaviruses have been around for millennia, but any theories of covid being around before the fall of 2019 don't make a lot of sense.  I'd buy it spreading at low levels in China by October 2019, Europe by Christmas, and the US by January 2020, but it is true that it exploded in March 2020.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Hawaii is now the final state with a mask mandate (and no final end date announced).

[100% pro-life no matter what]

What is going on in WV, to the point that 43 out of 55 counties are still recommended to wear masks indoors, despite 90% of the US population no longer being recommended to mask?

If you look at the NY Times covid map, you can see that there are three main pockets of substantial transmission (based on case rates, not the CDC metrics).  They are the Upper Mountain West (Idaho and Montana are actually #1 and #2 on their cases per capita chart), far Northern New England, and a swath of Appalachia centered on West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.

All of these areas are relatively isolated.  It may simply be a case of Omicron taking an extra week or two to reach them, so they are slightly behind the curve in coming down from its wave.

The South as a whole (the least vaccinated region and the one with the fewest restrictions) only has covid case rates in line with the national average, so I think it's more a case of Omicron having been late to arrive in the areas that are a little higher now.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

BA.2 will be the next wave in April-May-June.

No one cares.

Democrats will be hurt electorally if they use BA.2 as justification to reimpose restrictions or mandates.

I'm skeptical about BA2 in being a major wave in the US.  Even in Europe, some countries (like Sweden and Spain) are still in freefall.  Countries that had a higher peak of Omicron seem to be somewhat protected from going back up.  The US has so much natural immunity and so many people had Omicron in the last few months (I'd guess 70-80% of the US has been infected since Christmas, many of whom have no clue they were).  I could see a small ripple to the low case numbers, but I don't think we're going to shoot up again like we have a couple times.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Tennessee releases data weekly, and our week-over-week percentage decline was 52% this week versus 41% last week.  If cases were about to soar, I would expect that number to be coming down, not going up. 

Now, if we have two more weeks of cutting the cases in half each week, we'd be talking about like 115-120 cases per day statewide, which is well below even our minimum from the "virtual elimination" period last summer.  I'm skeptical that it's going to go that low, but we're already approaching early summer 2021 numbers.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

I was actually glad to see the photo of the crowded high school in Georgia, which looked almost like any ordinary school year. I thought Georgia had one of the worse rates of COVID right now.

If Georgia can get this close to normal, most other places can.

Did you see the article I posted earlier that Cherokee County, the first district to open yesterday, has already had to send home a second-grade class and teacher to quarantine for 14 days because one of the students has tested positive?  

This is nothing more than an illusion of normality.

they should not have EVER been quarantined.

One of my biggest regrets from the last two years is that I voluntarily quarantined for 11+ days after being exposed in October 2020- and even for several days after a negative PCR test.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

When do you think we will stop quarantining positive cases?

I’m guessing we will stop it for the vaccinated by the end of 2022

Is that legally required or just a recommendation?

It's technically just a recommendation, but it is culturally all but required.  Typically, no one would think twice if you were out in public with a cold or the flu, but you would not be received well if you were hanging out with friends and said "I just have a little bit of covid right now".

The weird thing is that no one cares if you have cold like symptoms, even if you don't get tested, but the second the "covid" label gets put on it, everything changes.  I've had people openly say that they were getting over colds and that they never got tested so that they wouldn't have to quarantine.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Cases have reached a trough and are going slightly up now. This is not very surprising, the same thing happened for about a month in 2021 and it was made out to be "impending doom" but then decreased further starting in late April/May.

But Dr. Fauci has been back on the Sunday shows just to remind everybody that he exists after being quiet for a while and that his favorite covid policies may be "needed" again.

I do think they might go up a bit soon, but the NYT still has rates going down, ever so slightly.  Yesterday's update brought the 7 day average to 29,014, which is the least since July 15th.  I also remember that last year's "spring wave" was disproportionately focused on certain places (most notably Michigan).  I wonder if there will be geographic disparities again this year, with cases plateauing or even declining in the South while they go up a bit in the North.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Probably April 18th, coupled with an ending of the requirement for Americans to get tested before returning to the US.  The CEOs of every airline sent Biden a letter demanding both (the latter reduces demand for international travel due to the uncertainty it would cause).

It wouldn't totally stun me if it is canceled before April 18th, but I'll say that it is announced before then but not allowed to go into effect until 4/18.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

For all the fear-mongering about the BA2 variant, cases have continued to (albeit slowly) decline, down 10% in the last week nationally.  They have ticked up a bit in some places that have less natural immunity and got hit less hard by the first Omicron wave, but I don't see anything to suggest that we're heading for another massive spike.

I could see it being like last spring's "April wave", where cases plateaued/slightly rose nationally due to increases in a couple places, while continuing to slowly fall in the South.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

I thought I'd visualize the NY Times data in terms of cases relative to the current national average of 8 cases/100K people.  The dark green states have case rates akin to the national rate during the period in June 2021 when we all thought it was over.



Dark Red: 12+ cases/100K (150%+ of national average)
Light Red: 9-11 cases/100K
Neutral: 8 cases/100K (national average)
Light Green: 5-7 cases/100K
Dark Green: </=4 cases/100K (50% of national average)

The biggest trends that stick out are the relatively high cases in the Northeast and the extremely low cases in the Deep South.  Kentucky really sticks out as an outlier, but their map shows that it's almost all in the eastern part of the state for some reason.  Generally speaking, cases are rising in the Northeast and falling elsewhere.

Louisiana and South Dakota have the lowest rates (at 2/100K), and Alaska has the highest rate (at 28/100K).

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Cases are rising again, that's why Biden Approvals are flatline again, he said that once Flu season was over we would be over Covid

He lied

In the real world, the national rolling case average hit a new low today.  Yes, the pace of decline is slow, but people have been talking about how cases are about to go up for like a month ago.  I still think we'll see a small ripple nationally (that is most pronounced in the Northeast), but the more time that passes without a surge, the less I believe this BA2 surge hype.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

CDC mask mandate for travelers struck down by federal judge

A federal judge in Florida struck down on Monday the Biden administration's mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport methods.

US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the mandate was unlawful because it exceeded the statutory authority of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and because its implementation violated administrative law.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/18/politics/cdc-mask-mandate-ruling/index.html

Nice birthday present

[100% pro-life no matter what]

CDC mask mandate for travelers struck down by federal judge

A federal judge in Florida struck down on Monday the Biden administration's mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport methods.

US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the mandate was unlawful because it exceeded the statutory authority of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and because its implementation violated administrative law.

It is unclear clear how quickly the ruling will be implemented at airports or train stations across the country or if the Justice Department will attempt to block the ruling and file an appeal.

Just last week, the CDC extended this mask mandate through May 3. The masking requirement applied to airplanes, trains, and other forms of public transportation.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/18/politics/cdc-mask-mandate-ruling/index.html

This decision will kill people, it's as simple as that. No other country would stand for this. The USA is the worst country in the world.

Other countries, including the UK, have already gotten rid of masks on planes.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Vice President Kamala Harris tests positive for Covid

Vice President Kamala Harris tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday after returning from a weeklong trip to California, the White House announced.

Vice President Kamala Harris tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday after returning from a weeklong trip to California, the White House announced.

Allen added, "She has not been a close contact to the President or First Lady due to their respective recent travel schedules. She will follow CDC guidelines and the advice of her physicians. The Vice President will return to the White House when she tests negative."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/politics/kamala-harris-positive-covid/index.html

Why was she tested in the first place?  That's pretty much always going to be my reaction to "xyz tests positive for covid" stories at this point.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

At what point will COVID-positive individuals no longer have to quarantine?

Why shouldn't people who are sick and contagious stay home from work/school? We already do this with the flu and norovirus, so why should covid be the exception?

Have you seriously always stayed home when you have a cold?  If so, that's very, very far from what I've experienced most people doing my whole life.  Anecdotally, at least my circle is at the point where no one bats an eye if someone says that they have a cold (and are hanging out with others).

[100% pro-life no matter what]

The national rise in cases seems to have plateaued this week.  The Northeast is in clear decline at this point.  The Midwest and West seem to be roughly flat.  The South has the lowest case rates but seems to still be rising (given that the South was the last to begin rising, it makes sense that the peak would be slightly delayed).  By mid-to-late June, the B.A. 2 ripple will probably be fading everywhere.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

The national rise in cases seems to have plateaued this week.  The Northeast is in clear decline at this point.  The Midwest and West seem to be roughly flat.  The South has the lowest case rates but seems to still be rising (given that the South was the last to begin rising, it makes sense that the peak would be slightly delayed).  By mid-to-late June, the B.A. 2 ripple will probably be fading everywhere.

The plateau in cases has now started to bend downwards.  There were some reporting delays due to Memorial Day (with higher Tuesday and Wednesdays to correct for that), but the overall R7 average should be accurate now, and it's down 9% nationally from when I posted this.

The Northeast is in freefall, the Midwest is in slight decline, the West appears to be just starting to decline, and the South appears to be peaking at the moment (as a whole, but the Deep South isn't at peak yet).