COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fauci-predicts-safe-effective-coronavirus-vaccine-end-year-n1239055

Music to my freaking ears.

Moderna or Pfizer announcing a vaccine (to much fanfare) is going to be 2020's
"October Surprise"

What exactly does it mean to "announce a vaccine"?

You mean general FDA approval?  I think that's pretty unlikely by October.
They may be able to release some preliminary Phase III trial results by then, but these will be pretty inscrutable to the general public.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It's dropping nationwide, but in how many states is it still increasing? I think Hawaii is starting to drop a little, so are there any left outside the Midwest?

Kentucky is at sort of a plateau, but it was always one of the lowest to begin with (and accomplished this without tossing people in jail over a stay-at-home order).

I think Iowa is leveling off, and I'm not sure why it had that really bad day a few days ago. That might have been a backlog.

Virginia definitely isn't dropping.  If anything we are gradually increasing.  We never had a big surge, and thus never had the opportunity to benefit from the association immunity.

A number of Southern states like Alabama and Tennessee seem to be stuck in limbo, clearly down from their peaks but with further declines having stalled out over the past two weeks.

Arizona had over 1,000 cases today for this first time since August 13...not sure what it going on there since they had seen the most dramatic decline of any state this summer.  Hopefully it is just a temporary blip.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

They should get a refund.  But simply expecting people to wear masks if they are going to have a gathering seems like a very reasonable expectation to me.

I am teaching an in-person college class right now, and while I am not privy to the students’ social lives, mask compliance on campus seems close to 100%, even outdoors.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Well this is frustrating:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/08/astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-study-put-on-hold-due-to-suspected-adverse-reaction-in-participant-in-the-u-k/

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So they want us to believe 50% of people who went to Sturgis got covid.

That would be absurd. Fortunately, that's not anywhere close to what it actually says. It estimates 250k cases as a result of Sturgis.

Grossly oversimplifying: if 2,500 people at Sturgis had it, and each of them spread it to ten people while they were there, and each of those 25,000 infected two more people over the week after, and each of those people infected two more the next week, and each of them two more the next week (three weeks, bringing us from the end of Sturgis to now) you get 250k cases.

So I can understand the second step in this calculation (each previously infected person spreading it to ten people) since this sort of event would seem to facilitate the spread in an extreme way. 

But I don’t understand the assumption that they would be three additional tiers of spread to two other people for each infection, even among people who had no connection to Sturgis.  This would assume an overall Rt of 2.  But rt.live currently estimates that only one state (WV) has an Rt right now greater than 1.2.   Given the steadiness of new cases, I’d have to think the overall Rt is around 1, not 2, which would reduce the total number by a factor of about 4.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Didn’t India lockdown hard really early?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Didn’t India lockdown hard really early?

Yes.
Are you trying to make a point or are you just genuinely curious?

It does seem to point to the dangers of responding to the threat of the virus by locking down too early.    It seems to have been the pattern in a lot of US states as well, especially places like California.

It also sounds like India had pretty strict mask requirements in place, and it is discouraging to me that this would not be more effective.  I also have to imagine the disruption in the Oxford vaccine trial must be especially troubling there, since my impression was India was putting more reliance on that vaccine than the others that are in advanced trials like Moderna and Pfizer (but I could be wrong).

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Obviously the pandemic isn’t over.  But the point at which we can do something else about it besides wait for a vaccine kind of is.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/JonLemire/status/1305205506689003520

Israel’s average new cases right now are about double what the US was experiencing six weeks ago at our peak.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Well here’s a weird theory that may explain the lower death rates in the past few months:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/face-masks-could-giving-people-covid-19-immunity-researchers/?fbclid=IwAR0z2sVoVRbaFS6uc62aeNHoGGmT9A1c_VpHZ_iBVc588UZ5ve_xYEgKGX0

I’ve felt for a while now that the inital advice of health experts NOT to wear masks may have been the biggest mistake of the entire course of the pandemic.  It would certainly be #1 if this theory turns out to be true.  If all of the lockdowns had simply been replaced with mask requirements, we could have save hundreds of thousands of lives as well as most of the economic damage.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Well here’s a weird theory that may explain the lower death rates in the past few months:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/face-masks-could-giving-people-covid-19-immunity-researchers/?fbclid=IwAR0z2sVoVRbaFS6uc62aeNHoGGmT9A1c_VpHZ_iBVc588UZ5ve_xYEgKGX0

I’ve felt for a while now that the inital advice of health experts NOT to wear masks may have been the biggest mistake of the entire course of the pandemic.  It would certainly be #1 if this theory turns out to be true.  If all of the lockdowns had simply been replaced with mask requirements, we could have save hundreds of thousands of lives as well as most of the economic damage.

And the reason the experts weren't recommending it was because they didn't want there to be a run on them and a shortage. Which happened anyway. America could have prepped for something like this with a massive stockpile of masks. Instead we invented a military branch to fight aliens.

So many people seems to be excusing the fact that health experts deliberately gave people bad medical advice that would cause them to downplay the seriousness of the virus because they didn't want people to panic and create a run on masks.

Now everyone is eviscerating Trump for deliberately downplaying the virus because he says he didn't want people to panic.

That's not to excuse Trump at all. Almost everything he has said and done throughout the pandemic has been unconscionable.  But so was the advice of health officials back in March and April.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Arkansas has 140 reported deaths today. Is that a mistake? It’s a 10% increase

Apparently it is the result of Arkansas adding all the past "probable" deaths to their total.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Another professor that I work with got into a Pfizer vaccine trial in North Carolina. She got the first shot last week and said she thinks it's likely she got the real vaccine because of how sore she got. She said their placebo is just saline and not a different real vaccine. She will be checked six times over the next year (the next to get the second dose).

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I thought the point of a placebo was that you don't know whether you got the real thing or not?

Right, that's why I was surprised they used saline since I'd think it would generally have fewer noticeable side effects.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/jbendery/status/1308075595130167301

If you examine the metrics used in this map, it isn’t really a map of which states are getting better or getting worse (as the labels seems to indicate).  It’s more a measure of the overall level of the virus, not the direction of that level. (The direction is just one of many indicators used to compile the categories.).

If you look at rt.live, which is much more a measure of pure trend, the three green NE states are all among then worst third or so.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

One of the strange aspects of this pandemic is that it is almost completely invisible unless you are close to someone who got seriously ill from it.

There is none of the shocking and powerful imagery of suffering and destruction you get from a war or a natural disaster.  Almost all of the coverage is statistics and interviews with scientists and maybe nurses providing second hand accounts.  I've seen almost no interviews with victims or coverage of people in the throes of illness.  

Back in April, there was some vivid imagery of hospitals being overrun in NY and Europe, but that has been almost entirely absent for several months.

Even on my own campus, we almost entirely relate to the virus through an online university "dashboard" of covid statistics.  There we can learn that several hundred students have been infected, but I have yet to see or hear of anyone being seriously ill.

I want to make it clear that I don't believe in any of the conspiracy theories out there about this virus.  But this is the sort of thing that makes them believable to many people.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

There is none of the shocking and powerful imagery of suffering and destruction you get from a war or a natural disaster.  Almost all of the coverage is statistics and interviews with scientists and maybe nurses providing second hand accounts.  I've seen almost no interviews with victims or coverage of people in the throes of illness.  

Back in April, there was some vivid imagery of hospitals being overrun in NY and Europe, but that has been almost entirely absent for several months.

It's out there, I've seen probably hundreds of such articles. The problem is television media isn't covering it because, to them, paying adequate attention to something for more than two weeks is bad for ratings.

And really they're complicit in this 'lets make it look like things are back to normal' mentality that the Trump admin and several states are pushing.

Written articles aren't the same as images and videos.  No one cared about the Vietnam war when it was just written up in articles either.

The media I was watching at least was covering this nonstop for most of the summer.
But they were covering it with statistics and interviews with medical professionals, not with images or interviews of victims.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Oh great we're heading right back up to 60K new cases per day, if the current trends hold.

Worldometers is actually reporting only 35k new cases today, a very slight week-over-week decline.  If total cases increased by 51k, there must have been some backlog reported.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

There’s virtually no country in the Western world that has succeeded at truly controlling the virus.  The only realistic policy that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives would have been vaccine challenge trials. 

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Pretty compelling evidence for reopening schools:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-outbreaks-schools-europe/2020/09/27/0dd19bf6-ff48-11ea-b0e4-350e4e60cc91_story.html

Viral spread in school appears rare enough, he said, that Belgian policymakers think having in-person class might actually be safer than virtual schooling, assuming students tend to be less rigorous about social distancing when they’re not being supervised in classrooms.

“The school environment, in our perception, is still quite a controlled environment,” he [Steven van Gucht, the head of viral diseases at Sciensano, Belgium’s national public health institute] said. “We think it’s better to have schools open than to send kids home, have them meet on the street and give them more opportunities to spread the virus.”

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

That's just ridiculous if you take even a brief look at the numbers.  The population of Florida is about 21 million.  They've reported just over 700,000 cases.  Even if we assume that as few as 1/5 of total cases have been detected, that would be 3.5 million cases, or about 17% of the state's population.   That's far too low to achieve herd immunity.

The herd immunity threshold is not 70% like we once thought.

Citation?

I posted this article from WaPo a few weeks ago suggesting the herd immunity threshold might actually be as low as 20%:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-coronavirus-manaus-herd-immunity/2020/08/23/0eccda40-d80e-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I haven’t been following each state as closely over the past few weeks, but it looks to me like North Dakota may have set a new national record for per capita daily cases today, at 86 per 100k population.  Florida and Arizona topped out at 71 and 67 respectively.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I’m suprised there’s been so little mention of the VRBPAC meeting tomorrow.  Below is a link with information about the meeting and how to attend online:

https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/vaccines-and-related-biological-products-advisory-committee-october-22-2020-meeting-announcement

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Saying we need to “on our own start taking collective action” seems like the very definition of an oxymoron.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So Trump’s response to covid has been utterly deranged, but we probably should have expected this from what has clearly been the worst presidential adminstration in American history.

Nevertheless, I think the apathy and incompetence of Trump has probably had only a marginally negative effect on the awful consequences of this pandemic.

Here are the covid death rates (per million) in the top 10 most populous countries in the western world (Europe and North/South America).

1.) USA - 691
2.) Brazil - 735
3.) Mexico - 683
4.) Germany - 120
5.) UK - 655
6.) France - 528
7.) Italy - 613
8.) Columbia - 584
9.) Spain - 743
10.) Argentina - 625

With the sole exception of Germany, there’s very little distinguishing the outcomes in any of these countries, despite what would appear to be very different attitudes and policies toward fighting the virus.

Really, this has not been a failure of the US.  It has been a failure of western individualist neo-liberal ideology, and even more specifically, the ideology of western medicine.  It is simply not rational in the context of a global pandemic to start from a first principle of extreme loss aversion, as western medicine trains doctors to do.

If we had treated this like a war from the start, rather than a series of millions of individual medical choices, we could have solved this pandemic months ago with a fraction of the death we have already seen.  But a war requires volunteers who are willing to risk their own individual well-being for the benefit of the safety and survival of the whole of society.  Those volunteers were readily available.  You can see almost 40,000 of them (myself included) signed up just on the 1DaySooner website.  But almost any suggestion to go down that path was immediately treated as somehow unthinkable and never even subject to serious discussion.

Once the virus as contagious as this had taken a foothold on our soil, we never stood a chance, as long as we were beholden to the individualist ideologies that made ever considering taking the necessary risks impossible.