The most reliable number is excess mortality, although it does lag by a month or so due to how long it takes to collect the date. Here is the chart for the US for the past few years:
You can see the massive drop off earlier this year when the vaccines became massively available. Since then, we've been tracking the upper bound of normal. Not great, but probably not bad considering all of the follow on effects of stress, isolation, closing down routine medical exams, job loss, business loss, and many other assorted things that also contribute to excess mortality.
For comparison, you can see the 2017/2018 flu season impact on excess mortality in the same chart.
The latest data on that chart is from Jul 12th due to reporting lag, which was the low point in COVID mortality before delta. There is none of the excess mortality due to delta which is currently captured in that chart.
Question for people that understand mRNA vaccines: why does the third dose supposedly have the same exact formulation? The narrative in the beginning was that this new technology would allow for vaccines to be developed and manufactured in ~1 month, tailored to the variants (even claiming that cancer would be next). Why can't we have a vaccine that's more effective against the new variants?
According to this [0] at least BioNTech/Pfizer seem to be developing a booster shot specifically targeting the Delta variant. But they do mention that they’ve just recently “manufactured” the mRNA so it’s probably still months from being approved and ready to be deployed.
I seem to recall that fda and maybe other regulatory agencies have said that approval of modified-payload mRNA vaccines will be quicker. I recall that Pfizer has tests for a delta variant shot underway and I (naively) hope they can include several mRNA sequences in the next booster. Otherwise, it’s just reloading the body’s antibody load. As the entire spike protein is presented, there’s no guarantee that each person’s antibodies are the same or even one variety. This differs from the monoclonal antibodies from Lilly and Regeneron which work as-is.
My understanding is that Delta variant is much more infectious, but doesn't differ very much in ways that would make it less recognizable to your immune system. So your body doesn't have any issue knowing there's a problem it just has a harder time fighting it off.
Has something like this happened before in history? Where we have the tools to avoid deaths both caused by COVID and the indirect deaths caused by a lack of healthcare capacity, but the people refuse to use them?
Obesity is a similar scourge, albeit it was not completely caused by misinformation.
Tbh I now see our society as a memetic organism and I think the cleansing of people who don’t understand reality is just a part of the process at this point.
It's so deadly it requires misinformation to kill people? Why do you think it's taking years for the public to reach consensus, if this is such a threat?
i think a very real problem people face is its hard to discern what is reliable information (information overload, earned mistrust in "mainstream media", environment/culture, etc)
banning misinformation might work short term, but longterm i suspect it will further harm things... long term credibility needs to be won back the hard way me thinks...
The death rate in Florida that I've seen reported suddenly dropped by half in the last couple weeks, which is really weird, because it's ahead of the reported case rate, where it normally lags.
The Miami Herald reported that a change in methodology has created an artificial gap distorting things:
I think that while DeSantis and the DOH may well be technically correct that the new method of reporting statistics is objectively more accurate in the long run, that doesn't mean that it isn't causing a distortion downstream, where it looks like nobody's dying on the most recent days, even though they are.
Here’s a couple exercises to test your intuition about this disease.
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Year on year risk
1. Pick an area with good covid stats. The google data on cases/hospitalizations/icu/deaths will do
2. Compare the stats for each with the numbers exactly one year ago. You may be surprised to find that unless the country is Qatar, every number will be worse than year on year. Including hospitalizations, icu and deaths
Like other respiratory viruses, SARS-Cov-2 is seasonal. You may recall that last year around this time, Florida and Texas had big waves before the north. And America had a big wave before Europe. Europe declared victory late summer 2020.
This is a surprising conclusion. Going into winter we appear to be in a worse position compared to last year.
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Relative vs. Absolute Risk of severe disease post vaccine
Here’s another exercise. Most reading this are likely vaccinated, as am I. You surely read that this vaccination has ~95% efficacy against severe disease. Great! I’ll take those odds. But what do they mean in absolute risk terms?
Let’s say that last year your local area had 1,000 cases a day, and had the wild type variant. At that level you had a certain risk tolerance. Now, relative to unvaccinated you back then, you have a 20x lower risk. But, it is 2021:
1. Delta seems to have a 2x odds ratio for hospitalization (source below). Oops. Your absolute risk reduction is only 10x.
2. Your local area has more cases now. See the first exercise. So if your area has 5x more cases, a typical multiple, then your absolute risk reduction for severe disease compared to same time last year is only 2x less. Oops.
Now, your peak risk will probably stay lower, as in a lot of places it is implausible that peak caseloads will hit 5x their peak loads. Among other things, ICU capacity would break before then. But this exercise is still valueable, as the merely relative protection of vaccination is unintuitive.
Oh, and the risk of an unvaccinated person compared to same time last year? 10x more! That preserves 95% efficacy.
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No one knows the future. Maybe these waves all peak, we hit the happy land of immunity as a herd, and we have a normal future.
But I say it is futility to declare victory over a respiratory pathogen until your country makes it through at least one winter with the level of restrictions you’d like. Summer is easy mode.
2. Country stats. For quickly checking a country, google is fastest. But they generally pull from our world in data, which is the best aggregator: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
>Like other respiratory viruses, SARS-Cov-2 is seasonal.
There have been three peaks so far, roughly January, May, and late August.
So I guess it's seasonal, if by seasonal you mean it's cycled in winter, spring, and summer so far.
Nothing before last winter compared to the three peaks we've had since. So we really have no information on a yearly cycle, especially since vaccination, however it plays out, has affected 2021.
It’s a respiratory coronavirus. We have decades of info on respiratory viruses and other coronaviruses. They peak November to April in northern hemisphere countries with strong summers. See page 4 here: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-virolo...
The late August peak has been a southern US phenomenon, seemingly associated with going inside during warm months for air conditioning. The south states were the ones that peaked early both years. Israel also had an early summer peak last year, associated with a heat wave.
In states and countries where people go outside, it is a strong bet that viral transmission will be stronger in the months when coronaviruses are seasonally strong.
>They peak November to April in northern hemisphere countries with strong summers.
In the US, things picked up in July and appear to be peaking now. Which is not November.
Conversely, globally, cases were at a lull as March began and near peak by May.
I'm not saying I can predict the future, but so far, I don't think the pattern you see exists.
>The late August peak has been a southern US phenomenon
I think that's a misleading way to put it, unless you accidentally wrote August when you meant May.
The late August peak is in the global stats, which I linked to.
What seems different for the US is that the spring wave was very attenuated and doesn't show up hardly at all in a graph. We essentially have had two big peaks and not three.
In 2020 there was a us wave in jul/august. This was strongest in the south. In 2021 there is also a july/august wave, strongest in the south. It is more present in the north than last year’s wave, but not at its biggest there. My prediction is the north will see a bigger wave later in the year as people head inside.
You can’t exclude variants either. Alpha was more contagious and got around the world by May, so that trumps seasonality. The May wave also began march/april and peaked later. But for any given variant it would be extremely unusual to see highest activity in summer not winter.
Im not sure we’ll “go back” to the happy days anymore. Even with booster shots my impression is we have a deadly disease that’s here to stay. But people lived with constant plague for hundreds of years, we just convinced ourselves we’d “left that behind” and that might not be true anymore. HIV and COVID demonstrate modern plagues can still come and overwhelm us.
No one ever went back to pre-HIV, we still use condoms. We just don’t let people die of it quite so easily anymore. But there was never a moment where HIV has stopped being a problem or having ended the possibility of non-deadly unprotected sex. Maybe COVID is the same - we will remember the pre COVID days as this wonderful time where we didn’t have to shoot RNA onto our arms every six months.
Funnily enough, I’ve lived in a zero covid area (nova scotia) and eliminating it was actually a far easier way of living than the “learn to live with it” approach practiced elsewhere. You have less travel, and you have to react quickly to small threats, but in exchange you get months and months of essentially normalcy.
I think it would still be feasible for the rich world to do in spring 2022, when it is warm season again, if we get tired of this. It could then be maintained with border agreements. We don’t accept endemic tuberculosis even though that is airborne.
The other thing that would make it easier would be if we actually started acting in the knowledge that it is airborne. We have treated SARS-Cov-2 as a droplet and fomite disease. This has meant we avoid easy and effective solutions (HEPA, open windows, co2 monitors, N95) in favour of inconvenient and ineffective solutions (six feet rule, hand washing, no hugs, deep cleaning). You’re infinitely safer giving a hug and holding breath for a couple seconds (if you choose) than going into an unventilated meeting six feet apart.
(I wash my hands of course, but it is a colossal error to make that the centerpoint of public health advice)
Pretty much every country that aimed at elimination achieved it pretty easily! Or at least for less aggregate effort than countries aiming at mitigation. For some reason we chose the latter.
What I find most interesting about this pandemic is how everyone seems to have become a virologist, epidemiologist, or both! The medical schools must be bursting at the seams. Tell me - where is it that you got your degree from?
>The other thing that would make it easier would be if we actually started acting in the knowledge that it is airborne
If you have a sincerely held belief that is controversial, then it's helpful to provide information about why you hold the belief and how you came to reject some other consensus.
The widely documented superspreader events are impossible to explain by droplet or fomite transmission. Literally impossible. You think an infected bar patron goes around within 6 feet of 80 other people and shakes their hands or breathes on them?
Sorry for the misunderstanding, the possibly controversial beliefs I was referring to were such as - "we" haven't been acting as if it was airborne, that there is a sharp distinction between droplets and airborne particles, and that the precautions that are appropriate are as you listed and the others are mostly useless.
Airborne particles are indeed in the CDC FAQ; I don't know how far back that goes.
Cdc added them may 2021 or so. The WHO still denies airborne spread. Plenty of jurisdictions still vigorously fight against recognizing aerosol spread as it would involve more work to fight. For example Ontario: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/08/26/ontario-fought-a...
And yes, if you have a virus that cam infect 245 people in the gym through the air, then ventilation is more important than handwashing. I’m not sure anyone has even established evidence for fomite spread! I expect it is a mechanism too but the point is it has been treated as default for some reason despite lack of evidence and evidence for other methods.
Influenza is also a deadly disease that is here to stay.
If you knock down its ability to cause severe disease by a factor of 20 or so and it becomes just another viral pneumonia, then we don't have a pandemic any more.
If everyone would just get vaccinated, we'd be there and it'd be over by now. Doomerism is counterproductive and doesn't help that.
Maybe? Back in July, 94% of english adults had antibodies! Their cases peaked and are rising again. This 94% doesn’t include kids, but with plenty of cases and vaccinations since then, not obvious high prior immunity makes it like flu. Influenza is basically dead right now with our current precautions, incidentally.
The UK is in summer, snd the virus is still spreading at near record rates with 94% adult immunity. On what basis do you believe it to be like the flu?
This isn’t doomerism btw. My position is SARS-Cov-2 likely isn’t livable, and we should eliminate it. Multiple societies have succeeded at it. Readily possible.
Maybe the winter will prove you right, but if it doesn’t I’m hoping people will come round to actually trying to get rid of the thing. Basically every country that tried to succeeded. It’s possible. Frankly the people who say we can’t beat it seem like the pessimists to me.
I can't find the methodology of that survey but if its not controlled for demographics it may oversample the vaccinated population.
And kids count and I really mean 100%. Also, if 20 year olds only have an 80% rate due to less vaccine uptake it'll still spread in that subpopulation of the UK and the near 100% vaccination rate of 80 year olds doesn't affect that spread because 80 years old aren't at the nightclubs where 20 year olds are spreading the virus.
Also obviously if kids under 16 in the UK only have a seropositivity of ~20% due to no vaccination then the virus will happily spread in that reservoir, particularly through the schools where kids are in close proximity to hundreds of other kids, before "hopping back" into adults. Much like a reservoir species (which incidentally is the reason why eradication of this virus is impossible)
We’ll see how it goes in the UK. Could be they’ll just decline over winter, I admit that’s certainly possible.
Regarding animal reservoirs, has there been a single confirmed or suspected case anywhere? Especially in a place that had transmission, like Wuhan, or Nova Scotia. Or with good contact tracing like South Korea. That’s certainly possible, but I don’t know it’s proven to be a certain problem. You’d expect lower animal transmission if it wasn’t rampant in humans too.
In the case of the mink cluster 5 there were confirmed cases of the mink-adapted SARS-CoV-2 genome in infected workers on the farms.
Without similar genotyping its impossible to say if there's other similar events happening with other species, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects enough other species to be considered promiscuous.
I’d heard of the mink. That would be easy enough to control with herd isolation and culls. Deer are trickier, but as the article notes we don’t know the state of active transmission.
On the basis of existing evidence I think it’s premature just to give up and say it’s impossible, without having tried.
The point isn't to fixate on the deer or the mink. The problem is multispecies and there's dozens of them at least. It is large enough to not be solvable.
I'd love it if we'd just give up entirely world-wide on mink farming already, but eradicating wild species is a non-starter.
And we will likely never even identify all the species out there which could be reservoirs. You'd need to fully survey African nations and we still can't figure out where Ebola is coming from.
There's going to be many times more species of animals that can be infected and be reservoirs of this virus that we don't know about than we do know about. And all those species in Africa count every bit as much as the minks closer to home.
What do you mean everyone? BC, Canada and Israel have some of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Yet cases continue to rise and restrictions are getting tighter.
The one thing delta really changed was that we're all either getting vaccinated or getting infected and recovering.
What we're doing now is dragging it out while the virus burns through the unvaccinated population still trying to flatten the curve to keep the hospitals from getting knocked over.
We could have no restrictions tomorrow if everyone were fully vaccinated today.
You actually don't mean variants you mean a future new strain that achieves escape mutation.
That won't escape T-cells recognition to the currently circulating strain of the virus. Once everyone is vaccinated or recovered the disease burden of any future strain will go down by an order of magnitude at least.
This is what happened with H1N1 which became endemic as simply seasonal influenza. After being displaced in 1957 by H2N2 it circulated in pigs for 50 years before jumping back into humans in 2009 -- but people born before 1957 still had cross-reactive T-cell immunity to the H1 protein of that virus. Existing human coronaviruses now just cause the common cold, even though HCoV-OC43 may have caused the last great pandemic of the 19th century with the 1889 pandemic.
These respiratory pandemics all burn out as they transition to endemic spread and nearly everyone gains cross-reactive immunity to future strains.
My biggest fear is immunity of an individual lasts around 6 month.Thats why we are looking at wave after wave in different countries approximately 6 months apart. Data from Israel is scary and kind of points to similar trend.
Are you talking about the data from Israel that shows efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine dropping to 67.5%?
If so what you are seeing is Simpson's paradox. The same data when broken down by under 50 and 50+ gives 91.8% and 85.2%. Breaking it down even farther by age group gives:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Confirmed deaths:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
The ratio of the two, case fatality rate:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...