U.S. new case counts continue a slow decline. We’re now at 27 new cases per 100K per day. You can either view that as down one from a few days ago, or essentially unchanged since mid-May.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 9/2/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Still just over 5000 hospitalizations a day. Still around 400 deaths a day.
Both deaths and hospitalizations remain concentrated among the oldest old.
And within the elderly, lack of vaccination remains a significant risk factor. These are observational data, so you should take them with a grain of salt. But the gist is pretty clear:
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
An interesting piece of research on COVID vaccines was in the news today. It’s this piece, in Nature:
SARS-CoV-2 vaccination induces mucosal antibody responses in previously infected individuals
It’s a bit of a slog cutting through all the science-speak, but the gist of it seems to be that if you’ve already recovered from COVID-19, if you then get vaccinated afterwards, you appear to develop really good resistance to further infection.
Being scientists, they can’t actually come out and say that, because that’s not exactly what they tested. But it’s pretty clear that’s what they think, due to this little bit of rumor-mongering tucked neatly into the conclusions section of the paper, emphasis mine:
Of note, among participants in the longitudinal observational Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS) study, breakthrough infection cases after vaccination have - in the pre-Omicron era - only been identified in individuals without SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to vaccination, and not in individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to vaccination (personal communication, data not yet published).
As I read it, if you’ve had COVID, and you’re wondering whether its worth getting a vaccine or booster after you’ve already had it, this study seems to be pushing pretty strongly in the direction of “yes”.
Separately, this piece, also in the news today, looks at the same issue, but the other way around. There, in a population that was almost fully vaccinated to some degree, the folks with a prior COVID-19 infection had stronger immunity against the new BA.5 variant.
Again, the conclusion is that the combination of prior infection and vaccine provides greater immunity than vaccination alone. Which seems pretty reasonable to me. And points to the same answer to the question of whether or not it’s worth getting vaccinated or boostered if you’ve already had COVID. As I read the current research, the answer is yes.
