Coronavirus 12: Don't Abandon Hope

[Drakle]

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1447544740501667841

Lancet paper - if Texas and Florida had matched Massachusetts' vaccination rate, as of August 31 they would have avoided roughly: 1,311,900 Covid cases 95,000 hospital admissions 22,000 deaths

Ron DeSantis is himself vaccinated, and yet he is fighting masks in classrooms and trying to ban the most notoriously disease-prone businesses (cruise companies) on Earth from requiring vaccination. it's a deliberate strategy

That's just 2 of the States, and they account for over 1 million cases, that could have been eliminated. And Massachusetts is only 71% vaccinated, which still isn't really that good.

 

[Snowygerry]

Soberana would be a good name for anti-hangover drug.
Cuba has pretty good healthcare actually, and 92% efficacy doesn't look unrealistic.

Soberano is already a brandy. Spanish iirc not Cuban

 

[red_elk]

Brandy as an adjective, meaning a word which could be a good brand name?

 

[Snowygerry]

A brand of brandy yes

 

[Samson]

A brand of brandy yes

But does it work against covid, or just make you care less?

 

[Gorbles]

But does it work against covid, or just make you care less?

Finally, a medical theory I'm willing to test!

 

[Samson]

New study on how bad reinfection is compared to initial infection. Answer = nothing like as bad

Reinfections had 90% lower odds of resulting in hospitalization or death than primary infections. Four reinfections were severe enough to lead to acute care hospitalization. None led to hospitalization in an ICU, and none ended in death. Reinfections were rare and were generally mild, perhaps because of the primed immune system after primary infection.

Accordingly, for a person who has already had a primary infection, the risk of having a severe reinfection is only approximately 1% of the risk of a previously uninfected person having a severe primary infection. It needs to be determined whether such protection against severe disease at reinfection lasts for a longer period, analogous to the immunity that develops against other seasonal “common-cold” coronaviruses, which elicit short-term immunity against mild reinfection but longer-term immunity against more severe illness with reinfection. If this were the case with SARS-CoV-2, the virus (or at least the variants studied to date) could adopt a more benign pattern of infection when it becomes endemic.
​

 

[red_elk]

It's very good news.

 

[Samson]

Source. Do note low N at the high end, but I think the effect is clear.

 

[amadeus]

I wonder how those figures would look adjusted for age/health-related risk factors.

 

[Samson]

That should be fairly easy to do, but I cannot be bothered right now. The source data has a number of relevant demographic features. I wondered what it would look like adjusted for covid rate prior to June. However I cannot imagine any of the factors will fully explain a 10 fold difference.

Spoiler demographic features :

% Uninsured,% In Poverty,% Over Age 65,Average household size,% Non-Hispanic Black,% Hispanic,% Non-Hispanic Native American / Alaskan Native,% Non-Hispanic Asian,SVI score,CCVI score

 

[EnglishEdward]

I wonder how those figures would look adjusted for age/health-related risk factors.

Well obviously, re-infected people are older than when they were first infected.

And one might have expected a (a) lessening of resistance due to age
offsetting the (b) increased resistance due to prior infection.

There may well be an age gap where (a) exceeds (b), but whether that
is on average at 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years has yet to be determined.

 

[amadeus]

Well obviously, re-infected people are older than when they were first infected.

I mean deaths by county/political affiliation. I’m skeptical that the gap is wide as it is shown.

 

[El_Machinae]

You're predicting that younger counties voted Democrat. That's a reasonable hypothesis.

 

[Samson]

You're predicting that younger counties voted Democrat. That's a reasonable hypothesis.

Surely except for a few retirement communities in Florida there cannot be that much age differential at the county level?

 

[El_Machinae]

It's just something that would come out with multi-factorial analysis

 

[uppi]

That should be fairly easy to do, but I cannot be bothered right now. The source data has a number of relevant demographic features. I wondered what it would look like adjusted for covid rate prior to June. However I cannot imagine any of the factors will fully explain a 10 fold difference.

Spoiler demographic features :

% Uninsured,% In Poverty,% Over Age 65,Average household size,% Non-Hispanic Black,% Hispanic,% Non-Hispanic Native American / Alaskan Native,% Non-Hispanic Asian,SVI score,CCVI score

The data is all there, but as far as I can tell, the individual files have no time resolution. So you would need to download all the daily files and I have not found a way to mass download them. I probably could write a crawler, but I am not bored enough for that (yet).

 

[Samson]

New variant to worry about? (also see nature)

South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla says the variant is behind an ‘exponential’ increase in COVID infections.

The variant – called B.1.1.529 – has a “very unusual constellation” of mutations, which are concerning because they could help it evade the body’s immune response and make it more transmissible, scientists told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said 22 positive cases of the new variant have been recorded in the country following genomic sequencing.
It has also been detected in Botswana and Hong Kong among travellers from South Africa, he said.

Scientists said the new B.1.1.529 variant has at least 10 mutations, compared with two for Delta or three for Beta.
“What gives us some concerns (is) that this variant might have not just have enhanced transmissibility, so spread more efficiently, but might also be able to get around parts of the immune system and the protection we have in our immune system,” said researcher Richard Lessells.
So far the variant has been seen spreading especially among young people.

“[Currently] we are trying to identify how widely spread this is. There will be a lot of work looking at: Is it more transmissible? Is it associated with any more severity of disease? Does it render the vaccines less effective?” Rees told Al Jazeera.
“In the meantime, our big request to the world, in terms of vaccinating the African region, is please get the vaccines out into the region because as we know variants don’t stay in one country,” she added.

Genome sequencing and other genetic analysis from de Oliveria’s team found that the B.1.1.529 variant was responsible for all of 77 of the virus samples they analysed from Gauteng, collected between 12 and 20 November. Analysis of hundreds more samples are in the works.​

 

[Takhisis]

Yay, cases rising again.

Also, the Grauniad reports that England and Israel are banning travel from southern Africa.

 

[stfoskey12]

A blog post about how it's sort of odd how different governments have different levels of Covid restrictions. It's something interesting I've noticed myself as well. At my home in Oklahoma we've been left alone since May, while there are still mask mandates where I'm visiting my family in North Carolina.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-weirdness-of-government-variation

A few quotes from the article:

But imagine at the start of the pandemic, someone had said to you “Everyone will face the existence of the same disease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU countries or US states, people won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cover their faces in public. In other places, government will just leave people alone. Vast differences of this sort will exist across jurisdictions that are similar on objective metrics of how bad the pandemic is at any particular moment.”

I would’ve thought that people in LA County would go, “Isn’t that weird? I have a sister in Orange County where they’re allowed to show their faces in stores, and they seem to be doing no worse than us. I also have a cousin in Louisiana, and his kids don’t even wear masks indoors in school, while my children wear them when playing outside during recess. And they have even less transmission in their area. Maybe this whole thing is stupid and my kids shouldn’t spend half their high school years not knowing what their classmates look like?” Or, alternatively, people would be so freaked out by COVID-19, that those living in Orange County would see that LA County has a mask mandate, and go crazy demanding the same thing. Likewise, I would’ve never expected that Austria would shut down the entire country, while its neighbors Slovakia and Slovenia have objectively worse numbers but let life be mostly normal.