China will be near collapse due to COVID19 — here’s why

Here is why I think China will be near collapse due to COVID19 in the next few months.

Due to a strict containment policy, the only experience the Chinese population (excepting Wuhan) has had with the pandemic virus has been by vaccination, mostly with Sinopharm and Coronavac.  These are known to be less effective against the Omicron variant than the western mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, etc.) which themselves are not terribly effective against infection.  So most Chinese are immunologic virgins for exposure to the variants of the pandemic virus and the omicron variant of the virus is incredibly infectious.

In contrast, western populations have been exposed to variant after variant of the pandemic virus, building up immunity to coronaviruses.  The vast majority of cases are mild not requiring hospitalization, and many are completely asymptomatic.

One small piece of evidence for this — there are many more —

The following is from a post July/2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html–https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/new-york-antibody-study-estimates-13point9percent-of-residents-have-had-the-coronavirus-cuomo-says.html.

New York State  randomly tested 3,000 people at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities to see if they had the antibodies to fight the coronavirus, indicating they have had the virus and recovered from it. With more than 19.4 million people residents, according to U.S. Census data, the preliminary results imply that at least 2.7 million New Yorkers have been infected with Covid-19.They weren’t all hospitalized.

If you’re into authoritative statements, here is Dr. Fauci 3 months ago –Source — https://nypost.com/2021/12/12/omicron-appears-to-evade-some-protection-from-covid-vaccines/

“We’re getting anecdotal information … not necessarily confirmed yet, that the level of severity appears to be maybe a bit less than in the Delta. But there are a lot of confounding issues that it may be due to the underlying protection in the community due to prior infections,”

Omicron spreads like wildfire.  For example, we had to call our plumber a week ago.  He has trained his teenage daughter to enter the trade.  We talked about the pandemic.  Teenagers love crowded parties (well I did, and so did our kids). His daughter  told us that apparently one irresponsible kid came to a party while sick in the early stages of what turned out to COVID19 and transmitted the virus to NINETEEN people.

Here is the Hong Kong experience.  It began with an aircrew member from Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., who was subsequently found to be infected with omicron.  He ate lunch at a restaurant 27 December ’21 with his family. . Five other customers later tested positive.   By the first week in March there were over 50,000 new cases each day.  Fortunately Hong Kong appears to have passed the peak with ‘only’ 20 – 30 thousand new cases each day.

The South China Morning Post of 16 March notes that 90% of Hong Kong residents have received one dose of a vaccine.  This hardly speaks well for the efficacy of whatever they received.

The Hong Kong experience has been rationalized by several reasons perhaps peculiar to Hong Kong:

l. A very low vaccination rate among the most vulnerable (e.g. over 80)

2. Very high population density — 50% of the population in Hong Kong live in public housing which is mostly very tall, very skinny high rises, due to the lack of buildable land in Hong Kong.  The elevators are a perfect way to transmit the virus.

I can’t speak to how common this is elsewhere in China.

5 days ago the number of cases in China was 1,000.  Today (16 March) I read that there were 5,100 on 15 March — https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3170631/china-reports-another-3000-covid-19-cases-latest-surge-continues?module=lead_hero_story&pgtype=homepage

So the elevator pitch is — a highly infectious virus is loose in a huge, previously uninfected population with minimal vaccine protection.

I was very worried that something like this could happen all over China in posts  written 2 and 3months ago, long before the number of cases in Hong Kong took off.  You can find my reasoning in the following post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/i-hope-to-hell-i-was-wrong-about-china/   It was published 15 January ’22, and can be found below and it contains the 12 December ’21 post:

Addendum 16 March — https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2203163160/–Mainland China now has 1,860 locally transmitted cases — with most in the province next to North, but in 20 other locations all over China including Shanghai and Beijing. This is is not good news given how infectious Omicron is.

 

I hope to Hell I was wrong about China

From the South China Morning Post — 9:52pm, 15 Jan, 2022

“The Chinese capital reported its first community case of the Omicron coronavirus variant on Saturday, with local and imported infections of the strain now detected in about half of the country’s provinces and municipalities.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3163525/china-braces-omicron-variant-extends-its-reach-and-lunar-new-

If true, containment, quarantine, lockdowns and isolation are hopeless.  The quote implies that they’ve already failed.

I find this very worrisome for reasons listed in a post 12 December 2021, a copy of which is below.

The short answer is that the mainland Chinese are immunologic virgins to exposure to the variants of the pandemic virus.  Hopefully their vaccines will work better against omicron than those of the west, but there is no reason to think they will.

Is China following a Smokey the Bear policy on the pandemic?

China is following a prevent pandemic virus infection policy, just as Smokey the Bear followed a prevent forrest fires policy.  The latter didn’t work out well, as although fires were prevented for a while. However, when fires did occur, they were much much worse than the smaller ones Smokey prevented.  There was much more tinder and stuff to burn.

Actually Smokey has changed his tune slightly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Bear  SmokeyBear.com’s current site has a section on “Benefits of Fire” that includes this information: “Fire managers can reintroduce fire into fire-dependent ecosystems with prescribed fire. Under specific, controlled conditions, the beneficial effects of natural fire can be recreated, fuel buildup can be reduced, and we can prevent the catastrophic losses of uncontrolled, unwanted wildfire.”

Revision 14 December 2021 — China’s policy of prevention has resulted in a Chinese population which has been vaccinated using two killed virus vaccines (Sinopharm, Coronavac).  They have not had any natural infections with the virus (aside from the original cases) as far as we know given what China has allowed out.

Infection with the virus itself exposes you to all its proteins, with your immune system responding to all of them.   Western vaccines are just to the spike protein.

It tends to be forgotten that moist cases of pandemic viral infection are asymptomatic.

Given 800K deaths  from COVID19  in the USA, how can I possibly say this is good. Here’s how :>

If you had an infection with the virus, you develop antibodies.  Nowadays, everyone who is vaccinated has antibodies so there is no point in testing for them, but what were things like in the days before vaccines?

The following is from a post July/2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html–https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/new-york-antibody-study-estimates-13point9percent-of-residents-have-had-the-coronavirus-cuomo-says.html.

New York State  randomly tested 3,000 people at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities to see if they had the antibodies to fight the coronavirus, indicating they have had the virus and recovered from it. With more than 19.4 million people residents, according to U.S. Census data, the preliminary results imply that at least 2.7 million New Yorkers have been infected with Covid-19.They weren’t all hospitalized.

Here’s some work the same month from Queens — https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html

At a clinic in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, more than 68 percent of people tested positive for antibodies to the new coronavirus. At another clinic in Jackson Heights, Queens, that number was 56 percent. But at a clinic in Cobble Hill, a mostly white and wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn, only 13 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.

So the disease has already to spread to half the population in some neighborhoods in Queens. If even 10% of them were sick that would have been 140,000 hospitalizations.  They didn’t happen.

OK, so a lot more people were infected than got sick.  Why is this good?

Enter the omicron variant of the pandemic virus.  It can evade the antibodies produced by all the current vaccines (in the West — protection against the Chinese killed viral vaccines CoronaVac and Sinopharm isn’t known yet).   Yet omicron doesn’t appear to produce severe disease. Thus far…

 

The CDC in the past week said of the 40+ omicron cases it knows about (there certainly are more out there, and more to come), there was one hospitalization (for two days) and no deaths.

Here is Dr. Fauci 12 December 2021 — “We’re getting anecdotal information … not necessarily confirmed yet, that the level of severity appears to be maybe a bit less than in the Delta. But there are a lot of confounding issues that it may be due to the underlying protection in the community due to prior infections,”

Source — https://nypost.com/2021/12/12/omicron-appears-to-evade-some-protection-from-covid-vaccines/

So the Chinese population may be sitting ducks for omicron having been given vaccines (Sinopharm, Coronavac) of unknown potency against omicron.  If their statistics are true there has been little or no natural infection with the pandemic virus in the Chinese population (which Fauci has just implicated is protective),.  Given that I have a son, daughter in law and two grandkids living in Hong Kong, I find this extremely disconcerting.

 

COVID19 is bad for your brain even if you aren’t hospitalized

We now know that even COVID19 that doesn’t put you in the hospital is bad for your brain.  How do we know this?  Think of how you would design an experiment to find this out using real people.

Only a monster would do something like this.  Take 800 people, study the hell out of them.  MRI their brain, do cognitive tests, know just about everything about the medical and social history.  Then expose them to the pandemic virus.  Some get infected (as judged by their health records and antibody to the virus tests).  I’ll call the infected COVID19 to save time. Wait a few months then test them all over again, MRIs, cognitive tests, medical history etc. etc.

Such an experiment was done and what follows is a description of a paper given in a link a friend sent —  doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04569-5. Online ahead of print. PMID: 35255491.  To be noted, is that the paper is still being edited by Nature, so some things may change but I’m pretty sure the conclusions will stand.

The work was done by the UK Biobank which which recruited 500,000 volunteers   aged 40 to 60 from 2006 to 2010 and is following them for 30 years.  All donated urine, saliva and blood in addition to filling out questionnaires with consent for access to their electronic health records.  Last year the Biobank released the (anonymized hopefully) complete genome sequences of 200,000 people.

This was long before the pandemic hit.   The paper reports results on 785 participants ages 51 – 81 who had MRIs twice (once before the pandemic hit, and once afterward).  There were 401 who had been infected.  The 384 uninfected controls were selected to be matched for age, sex, ethnicity and time between the two MRIs (which were an average of 38 months apart).   The average time between becoming infected and the second MRI and testing was 20 weeks.

How many of the 785 were hospitalized?  Just 15/401 infected (3.7%) showing that most pandemic infections were pretty benign.  The 15 hospitalized were excluded from further analysis

The paper was submitted to Nature in August of 2021, long before omicron appeared on the scene.

So these are huge numbers of subjects, all of whom had been intensively studied before the pandemic hit, which makes it so valuable.

There is a huge amount of data, but here are a few of the high points. All of what follows compares the infected to uninfected controls.

l. The infected had a greater reduction in gray matter between the MRIs, particularly in that part of the brain close to the nose.2. The infected had greater reductions in brain size (but not that much, the average atrophy was 2%).

3. We all cognitively decline as we get older, but the decline was greater in the infected.

With this many people in the study, they could group people into two year bins.  So there was no atrophy in one area (relative to controls) in people between 55 and 60, but at 76 the same area showed 20% atrophy in patients but only 5% in controls.

It is obvious on looking at the graphs plotting results for the infected vs age and results for the uninfected in the same panel, that the differences between the infected and the controls increased with age.

The cognitive testing reported was rather simple — but it could be quantitated.  It was time to complete the trail A and trail B tests.  In these trials subjects are to connect a set of 25 dots as quickly as possible.  The observer notes mistakes and allows people to correct them until they get everything right.

Part A has the dots numbered and they are to be connected in order.  This is thought to test cognitive processing speed.

Part B has the first 13 integers and letters from A to L.  They are to be connected as follows 1 – A – 2 – B – 3 -C —   This is thought to test executive function.

There are, tons more data of interest to a neurologist — which particular parts of the brain are hardest hit etc. etc. but I’ll leave it to you to follow the link

 

Are the antiVaxers already relatively immune?

As delta, omicron and god knows what other Greek letter variant of the pandemic virus marches through our population, it is time to find out how many of the unvaccinated have actually been infected asymptomatically.  It could well be most of them.  Studies done July 2020, a year and a half ago in New York State (before we even had vaccines) showed high levels of antibodies to the virus.

Do distinguish what an antibody to the virus means from a positive PCR or antigen test.  A positive antibody test means you’ve been infected with the virus at some point — almost certainly it’s long gone (the footprint of the bear is not the actual bear — sounds like Zen).  A positive antigen or PCR test means that the virus is within you now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html

At a clinic in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, more than 68 percent of people tested positive for antibodies to the new coronavirus. At another clinic in Jackson Heights, Queens, that number was 56 percent. But at a clinic in Cobble Hill, a mostly white and wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn, only 13 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.

Note the date — July of 2020.   Clearly most of these people did not require hospitalization.

So it’s time to look for antibodies in the never vaccinateds (there is no point in looking at the already vaccinated as they should have them).  If the never vaccinated antibody rate is as high as I think it is (>80%), it’s time to stop the lockdowns, the maskings, and the school closures.  Why — because they’ve already been infected and fought off the virus.

It is clear that vaccination will not keep you out of the hospital.

At the end of 25 January the state of Massachusetts had 2,617 people in the hospital with COVID19, 405 in the ICU and 248 intubated.  Half of them are described by the department of Health are described as ‘fully vaccinated’  (which just means 2 shots as of their definition of September 2021 — clearly this should be updated).   Probably almost all of these are with omicron.

Although this is bad, it represents a drop from 3,192, 466 and 290 just a week ago.

I doubt that such a study will be done, but it would be useful.

Addendum  Science 28 January 2022  p. 387.  Well how wrong could I be . “A serosurvey he led in Gauteng province, home to one-quarter of South Africa’s population, showed close to 70% of unvaccinated people carried SARS-CoV-2 antibodies at the start of the Omicron wave. In the next survey, he expects that number to have gone up to at least 85%, a level that should prepare South Africa for a post-Omicron future.”

Second Addendum 28 January 2022 — Here’s a link to (and a bit more about)  the paper on which the proceeding paragraph was based — It’s not peer-reviewed yet, but it’s from the S. African Medical Research Council, so it is likely to be valid. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21268096v1.full.pdf

The serosurvey was recent (22 October – 9 December 2021) and just before omicron hit the country.   Only 1,319 of the 7,010 people in the study were vaccinated.  An amazing 70% of the unvaccinated were seropositive (had antibodies to the pandemic virus).  As (not quite expected) the vaccinated had a higher seropositive rate (93%) but I thought it would be higher.

This is exactly the sort of study carried out in New York, where the testers went out and grabbed people to get a sample of what was actually going on in the population at large which makes it highly likely to be valid.  We should do a similar study in the USA.

What would really be terrific (but I don’t think it exists yet) would be a test for antibodies to omicron which distinguishes them from antibodies to older SARS-CoV-2 variants.

There is some evidence that vaccination protects against severe infections with omicron, so leave that to the unvaccinated, and leave the rest of us alone.

Who is Gabriel Leung and why you should very much care what he says

From today’s (5 Jan) South China Morning Post (SCMP)

“Fellow government adviser Professor Gabriel Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine, told a radio programme there were “probably five to 10 invisible transmission chains in the community. It’s a very alarming situation”.

Here is what Dr. Leung had to say almost two years ago to the day in the SCMP of 27 Jan 2020.

“As of a few days ago the virus had been found in 29/31 Chinese provinces. ” and “research shows self-sustaining human-to-human transmission is already happening in all major mainland cities.”

Clearly he was right 2 years ago, and widely ignored in the west.   I thought the US government had people watching China.

There were 38 cases of COVID19 in Hong Kong today.  Some of them have the omicron variant (if not all).

This is very scary as despite immunization with Sinopharm and Coronavac, the Chinese are basically immunologic virgins as they have had little exposure to the pandemic virus (Wuhan excepted).  Hopefully it will work better than the Western vaccines.  As of 4 January 2022 Massachusetts had 2,426 hospitalized cases of COVID19 of which 973 were ‘fully vaccinated’ e.g. 40% of cases– not sure if this means 2 shots or 2 shots plus a booster.  On 21 December we had 1621 cases in hospital and the fully vaccinated accounted for only 29%.  So it’s getting worse here.

For an elaboration of why I think the Chinese are particularly vulnerable to omicron see yesterdays post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/were-about-to-find-out-just-how-good-the-chinese-vaccines-are-against-omicron/

Addendum 7 January 2022

As of 6 Jan Massachusetts had 2,637 COVID19 cases of which 42% are described as ‘fully vaccinated’.

It looks like Dr. Leung was right (again).  From today’s SCMP

“At least 18 locally transmitted cases have been reported in Hong Kong in recent days and the city is reimposing some of its toughest Covid-19 social-distancing measures.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3162526/shenzhen-covid-19-cases-lower-hopes-hong-kong-border-reopening?module=perpetual_scroll_1&pgtype=article&campaign=3162526

The pandemic isn’t ending by a long shot

There’s nothing like data to change your mind.  Just 6 days ago I posted a rather optimistic take on the pandemic which I updated daily (a copy of the most recent  update 31 December ’21 is to be found after the ****

It began like this

I hope I’m not doing what I’ve seen many times, a devoted family hovering over a brain dead patient seeing signs of life when none exists because they desperately want to. Who can blame them?  They’re human beings not rational automatons.  Nonetheless, there are two signs that the pandemic is actually ending.

Well, I was doing exactly that.

The media endlessly  trumpets a surge in ‘casesm but remember a case is defined as finding the virus (in the form of a viral protein or the viral genome) in your respiratory passages.  It does NOT mean you are sick.

Example — a few days it was mentioned that 800 kids were being admitted to the hospital each day in the USA with COVID19.  However every hospital admission gets tested for the virus, and it turns out the kids were being admitted for other childhood problems — fractures, appendicitis etc. etc.  They weren’t sick with COVID19.

So I was encouraged, that despite the surge in ‘cases’ people sick with COVID19 weren’t filling the hospitals.  Hospitalizations and death are the numbers you need to know.

Here is some data from my home state of Massachusetts

Date stands for the date of the report, and includes all data up to and including the previous day — Total cases is really total cases of COVID19 in hospital.

Date       Total cases   Fully vaccinated   % fully vaccinated

21 Dec      1,621            470                       29%

22 Dec     1,632            500                      31%

23 Dec     1,595           503                       31%

So I was pretty optimistic that the pandemic could be peaking when I wrote the post on December 26.

Data proved me wrong

27 Dec       1,636         509                       31%  — essentially the same

28 Dec      1,707           529                       31%

29 Dec       1,711           572                       33%

30 Dec       1,817          631                       35%

31 Dec         1,954        686                       35%

If you’d like to follow the Massachusetts data yourself — here’s a link — https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting#covid-19-interactive-data-dashboard-

It is updated each day (except on weekends) after 5 PM

Ditto for Florida. Here’s where I got the data — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-cases.html

Look at the Florida data carefully.  There are 4 graphs, a big one on the top of ‘cases’ from March 2020 to the present.  You can click on it at any point and see how many new ‘cases’ there were that day.

Now  below this there are 3 more graphs (but each is shrunk down to 1/3 the size of the top one to fit).  They are from left — number of tests, number hospitalized, and number of deaths.

Note the left most — the number of tests increases in December about the same way the number of cases does  — so although there is a surge, it may be due (in part) to increased testing.

Note the two right most graphs — hospitalizations and deaths.

A comparison with Massachusetts is instructive –Florida with a population of 20 million or so had only 2,005 COVID19 patients in hospital on Christmas day, while Massachusetts withs 6.7 million had 1,505.  So what has Florida done that we’re not doing up here?

Addendum 27 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 26 December was 2129 a 6% increase from 25 December.

Date                     COVID cases (Florida)  Deaths

26 December           2129                               22

27 December           2228                               18

28 December           2560                              16

29  December         2963                               16

30  December          3376                              19

Given the greater than 50% increase in hospitalized cases in a few days, I think that daily deaths will similarly increase (with a 1 – 2 week time lag as is usually the case).

Then there are curve balls about the data itself

On 28 December the CDC said that it had overestimated the prevalence of omicron — According to agency data, omicron accounted for about 59 percent of all U.S. infections as of Dec. 25. Previously, the CDC said the omicron variant comprised 73 percent of all cases for the week ending Dec. 18. But that number has now been revised to 22.5 percent of all cases.– https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions

So that means that omicron deaths won’t be as large as the initial prevalences given by the CDC implied. Revisions of data are common and unavoidable in a fluid situation like this.

The sudden shifts in data and information (sometimes incorrect, sometimes conflicting) is so typical of the early days of a new disease.  It so reminds of the early days of AIDs in the 80s when I was in practice.

In medicine, you never have the data you really want.  But you do not have the luxury of waiting for it.  You have to advise patients and families with the information you do have.  It’s difficult and frustrating, but very fit work for your intelligence.  And it’s important in a way that few things are.

Now here is the old post with all its twists and turns. You may find it interesting

********

This post is updated daily with new data — today’s is 31 December.

Addendum 30 December — nothing like new data to make you change your mind. Going from 2005 hospitalized COVID19 cases 25 Dec to 2,963 on 29 December in FLorida is a significant surge.  The fat lady hasn’t sung in Massachusetts, New York or Florida.  The pandemic is surging where it counts — hospitalized COVID19 patients.

 

I hope I’m not doing what I’ve seen many times, a devoted family hovering over a brain dead patient seeing signs of life when none exists because they desperately want to. Who can blame them?  They’re human beings not rational automatons.  Nonetheless, there are two signs that the pandemic is actually ending.

First, some background.  The media endlessly trumpets surges in ‘cases’.   Here’s the latest from Massachusetts — https://www.wwlp.com/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-surge-in-mass-continues-to-cancel-news-years-eve-celebrations/.

Remember a case is defined as finding the virus (in the form of a viral protein or the viral genome) in your respiratory passages.  It does NOT mean you are sick

Nonetheless, there are two signs that the pandemic is actually ending.

First from Massachusetts, where ‘we believe’ in science and the adults in the room are in charge.  There is no question that the number of cases has dramatically increased in the past month — follow the following link to an excellent site which allows you to click and explore

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting#covid-19-interactive-data-dashboard-

If you click on various points of the curve you’ll see that a month ago the state had 750 people in the hospital with COVID19. On 23 December there were 1,595 — surge enough for anyone.

As someone well over 60 and being fully vaccinated (Pfizer) with a booster 9/21 I’me very interested in how many breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people there are — it was 503/1595 on 23 December 31.5% hardly trivial.They don’t give an age distribution of breakthroughs at various ages, but based on past experience, it’s likely to be highest in the Medicare set.

I’ve been watching the site for the past few days and here are the numbers.  Date stands for the date of the report, and includes all data up to and including the previous day — Total cases is really total cases of COVID19 in hospital.

Date       Total cases   Fully vaccinated   % fully vaccinated

21 Dec      1,621            470                       29%

22 Dec     1,632            500                      31%

23 Dec     1,595           503                       31%

Addendum 27 Dec

27 Dec       1,636         509                       31%  — essentially the same

Addendum 28 Dec

28 Dec      1,707         529                          31%

Addendum 29 Dec

29 Dec       1,711         572                          33%

Addendum 30 Dec

30 Dec       1,817       631                            35%

Addendum 31 Dec

31 Dec         1,954     686                           35%

Not stable or decreasing — 1817 is 14% increase from a week ago 23 Dec.  Note that the percentage of the fully vaccinated is increasing.  Certainly no longer the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Florida jumped 10% today (see below) which shows why you’ve got to get figures each day and look at trends

I plan on daily updates for the rest of the week.  Things look quite stable in Massachusetts — not so much in Florida

Addendum 29 Dec — the statistics in New York State are nowhere as good — https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary

On 21 Dec there were 4200 or so COVID cases in hospital in New York State — as of the 28th there are around 6600.

Now both New York State and Florida both have about 20 million people, yet Florida’s case load today of 2560 is only 38% that of New York ! !  A smart friend thinks this is due to the far greater population density in NY (particularly in New York City).  Perhaps, but there has been a huge amount of criticism in the New York Times and other elements of the mainstream press of Florida and its Governor for they way they’ve been lax about masking, school closures, and social distancing.

Addendum 30 Dec

Comparing Florida and New York again.  Florida has a population of 21,480,00 and 62.390 deaths.  New York has a population of 19,450,00 and 58,560 deaths.   So Florida has 2% more death per capita.  Much closer than I had been led to believe by the press which basically called Governor DeSantis a murderer due to his unmasking policy.  Well, maybe he is, but then so is former Governor Cuomo for sending recovered COVID19 nursing home patients back to the nursing to infect the vulnerable

The numbers in Massachusetts are pretty stable and large enough to be significant. Now maybe this is seeing signs of life where none exist due to lags in reporting due to the Christmas holiday etc. etc.   But if it isn’t, it is good news.  I await next week’s numbers with great interest.

Addendum 30 Dec — Well it was wishful thinking.

Second — the data from Florida as of 26 December– according to the New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-cases.html

There are 4 graphs, a big one on the top of ‘cases’ from March 2020 to the present.  You can click on it at any point and see how many new ‘cases’ there were that day.

In case you can’t, here are a few numbers.

Date                 new cases

24 December  31,683

23 November   1,605

Certainly, surge enough for anyone.

Now  below this there are 3 more graphs (but each is shrunk down to 1/3 the size of the top one to fit).  They are from left — number of tests, number hospitalized, and number of deaths.

Note the left most — the number of tests increases in December about the same way the number of cases does  — so although there is a surge, it may be due (in part) to increased testing.

Note the two right most graphs — hospitalizations and deaths.  They don’t really budge in December.

In particular the deaths appear to have declined.  Again a caveat about the reporting accuracy over the Christmas holiday.

Also note that Florida with a population of 20 million or so had only 2,005 COVID19 patients in hospital on Christmas day, while Massachusetts withs 6.7 million had 1,505.  So what has Florida done that we’re not doing up here?

Addendum 27 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 26 December was 2129 a 6% increase from 25 December.

Addendum 28 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 27 Dec  2228 another 5% increase

Addendum 29 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 28 Dec 2,560 — a big increase

Addendum 30 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 29 December is 2,963 — another big increase

Addendum  31 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 30 December is 3,376

I should have reported the number of deaths earlier, but didn’t, but I will start now.  It is given daily by the NYT, but the graph of deaths isn’t interactive and you can’t pick these numbers from it

There were 22 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 26th.

There were 18 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 27th

There were 16 COVID19 death in Florida on the 28th — increase sure to follow the increase in COVID19 cases in hospital

There were 16 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 29th — increases sure to follow

There were 19 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 30th  — increases sure to follow

I plan on daily updates for the rest of the week, so you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions.  Look at the third graph in the second line, it doesn’t look like deaths are surging.

But if accurate, the conclusion is inescapable — the currently extant virus variant (omicron) simply is NOT putting people in the hospital the way the earlier surges did.  Again have a look at the preceding 3 bumps in hospitalization for COVID19 since March 2020, and note how they parallel the number of cases.

Addendum 30 December — nothing like new data to make you change your mind. Going from 2005 hospitalized COVID19 cases 25 Dec to 2,963 on 29 December in FLorida is a significant surge.  The fat lady hasn’t sung in Massachusetts, New York or Florida.  The pandemic is surging where it counts — hospitalized COVID19 patients.

It is thought that the omicron variant accounts for over 50% of new infections no matter where you are, and over 90% in the NY metropolitan area.  So the surge in the new variant may actually be a good thing in that it is replacing delta (the previous dominant variant), a more virulent form of the virus, by a more innocuous one,.

Stay tuned and relax a bit.

Yet another Addendum 29 December (if you can stand it)— yesterday the CDC said that it had overestimated the prevalence of omicron — According to agency data, omicron accounted for about 59 percent of all U.S. infections as of Dec. 25. Previously, the CDC said the omicron variant comprised 73 percent of all cases for the week ending Dec. 18. But that number has now been revised to 22.5 percent of all cases.– https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions

So that means that omicron deaths won’t be as large as the initial prevalences given by the CDC implied. Revisions of data are common and unavoidable in a fluid situation like this.

Reasoning about data as it comes in is exactly what scientists do.  I love doing this. Any guesses as to what tomorrow will bring?

It’s the early days of AIDS all over again

Probably no one under 50 has any idea of what the first few years of AIDS were like.  Well, it is exactly like what the past 2 years of the pandemic have been.  In both cases there was/is  something out there that we don’t understand which can kill you.  The first cases appeared 40 years ago in June.  The cause (Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1 — HIV1) was isolated in 1984.  The fear until then  was palpable.  We didn’t know what it was or how it was transmitted.  Eventually it became clear that sex was  involved, and I remember reading the riot act about protecting themselves to a roomful of my teenaged sons and their friends.  It was probably one of the most useful things I ever did.

I personally knew physicians and dentists who refused to treat AIDS patients.  Sick jokes like this one were prevalent

Q. What is the AIDs diet ?

A. Pizza and Pancakes

Q. Why that?

A. Because you can slide it under the door.

It really isn’t so different from now even though we know the cause of the pandemic and we know how it is transmitted.  But we do not know what the virus will do next.  We do not know how often we need boosters, or even whether they will work against the new variant (omicron).  We are far from certain just how much to isolate ourselves (this clearly depends on our age).

One day the news is good — like this from the BBC earlier this week

There is community transmission of the Omicron coronavirus variant in multiple regions of England, Health Secretary Sajid Javid has confirmed.

He told MPs the variant was continuing to spread “here and around the world” and there were now cases here “with no links to international travel”.

There have been 336 confirmed cases of the highly-mutated variant across the UK, he said, a rise of 90 from Sunday.

There are concerns about how Omicron could interact with current vaccines.

Of the confirmed Omicron cases, 261 were in England, 71 in Scotland and four in Wales – while Northern Ireland is yet to have a confirmed case.

Mr Javid said that as far as he was aware none of those people had been admitted to hospital.

The next day it gets scary again —  from the Massachusetts Department of Public health — also this week.

“There are now 1,151 COVID patients in the state, a daily jump of 33 patients. Hospitalizations have been spiking in recent weeks, reflecting a 129% jump from 502 patients a few weeks ago.The state reported that 239 patients are in intensive care units, and 126 patients are currently intubated.

Of the 1,151 total hospitalizations, 407 patients are fully vaccinated — or about 35%. It’s the first time the state has reported more than 400 breakthrough hospitalizations on one day. Those who are unvaccinated are at a much higher risk for a severe case.”

Here’s a link to the full article — https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/12/07/massachusetts-reports-3720-new-coronavirus-cases-breakthrough-case-count-hits-record-high/

It is clear that the vaccines, while helpful are not a panacea, and a personal friend came down with it again 2 months after receiving a booster.  There is no question that the vaccines are protective to some extent, just nowhere near what they were originally billed as.