Category: COVID through 2022

 

If you guessed that the U.S. has an average of about 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, AND that this is more-or-less unchanged from a week ago, then you’re today’s big winner.

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 3/31/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page 3may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

---

Maybe our response shouldn’t be binary

The U.K. seems to have made a secondary peak now.   Note that their current rate is almost 20x the U.S. new case rate.  It’s not that Omicron hit them particularly harder than it hit the U.S.   Our peak rate was almost 250 new cases per 100K per day.  It’s that it never really went away there.  And now it’s back, as son-of-Omicron (BA.2).

Source:  Johns Hopkins data via Google search

And yet, the U.K.’s response to COVID-19 — and our response to COVID-19 — seems to be an either-or, yes-no approach.  Either yes, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and precautions should be taken.  Or no, we’re over it, go back to exactly what you were doing before this all happened.  (Which is pretty much where the U.K is right now.)

And maybe that’s not the brightest approach.  Maybe some modest permanent changes might be more efficient.  Because maybe, just maybe, what we’re looking at for the forseeable future is a permanent change in the “disease environment”, for want of a better term.

Today’s Guardian has an insightful article about this.  Really, it’s about what “endemic” is supposed to mean. As opposed to what they are actually experiencing in Great Britain.

I think it’s well worth the five minute read.  Because, as I’ve said here before, I can’t quite get my mind around just how, exactly, Omicron/son-of-Omicrion is supposed to be come “endemic”, in the sense that the common cold is endemic.  And that article explains that quite clearly.

Omicron/son-of-Omicron is ridiculously easy to spread, compared to other endemic diseases.  The R-nought for BA.2 is estimated to be somewhere around 22, versus a typical value of 1.75 or so for seasonal flu.  But immunity seems to fade rapidly, re-infections are now common, and the existing vaccines are mediocre, at best, at preventing any new infection.  So, just like the flu, just because you had it last year doesn’t mean you can’t get it again this year.  Flu shot or no flu shot.

When scientists use the term endemic, they mean something that a) is present in the population, and b) doesn’t flare up into huge outbreaks.  We also think of it as implying something relatively mild, but the Guardian points out that (e.g.) tuberculosis and malaria are endemic in much of the world, and those most certainly kill a lot of people.

Well, take a look at Great Britain.  Official policy now treats BA.2/son-of-Omicrion as if it’s endemic, but it currently meets none of the criteria.  The U.K. hospital system is once again under strain from the volume of admissions for COVID.

So if I had one takeaway from the Guardian article, it’s that maybe we’re just not quite getting our minds straight about this.  Everybody wants to return to the pre-COVID world.  But that world no longer exists.

Right now, seasonality is in our favor.  BA.2 or not, this is the time of year when conditions favor a reduction in spread of most or all airborne viral diseases.  It’s the end of flu season.  All other things equal, it ought to be the end of COVID season.

If we manage to get through BA.2, and into the summer, are we really just going to declare victory and pretend that this is all behind us, and nothing has changed?  Yeah, probably, I’d guess we’re going to try to do that.

But I can’t quite get my mind around what a nice, politely-behaved endemic Omicron is supposed to look like.  As the Guaradian points out, that’s probably a myth.  It certainly looks like a myth for Great Britain, right now.

Basing policy on myth is generally not a good idea.  But what set of rationally-thought-through permanent changes are we planning to implement?  Sure looks like none, to me.  E.g., at what new-case level would a Federal mask mandate on public transportation be re-instated (assuming it’s ever lifted)?  Nobody can even ask that question without getting slapped down.

Which means that, in effect, we’re hoping there will never be another outbreak.  Which really means that, with each new outbreak, we’ll just be winging it again.

Right now, COVID-19 presents less risk of hospitalization and death, for a vaccinated and boostered individual, than seasonal flu does.  So, right now, nobody needs to think about the most ration response in the event of another outbreak.  Which means that right now would be the right time to have some rational discussion about some forward-looking public health policy in this area.

Next time, maybe it would be better if our public health show was more scripted, and less improv.

 

The U.S. still stands at 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, roughly unchanged over the past seven days. That’s not due to a uniformly unchanging situation across the country, but to offsetting effects.  Rapid new-case increases in the Northeast are being offset by equally rapid continuing declines in the Mountain and Pacific regions.

Continue reading Post #1473: COVID-19 non-trend to 3/29/2022

 

The U.S still stands at about 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, unchanged from seven days ago.

Take that with a grain of salt, as an increasing number of states seem to be reporting their new case data at more-or-less random intervals.

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 3/29/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page 3may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

Separately, the more-infectious son-of-Omicron strain (BA.2) is now the dominant strain in the U.S.  Which is great news, given that this has occured and we still aren’t seeing a European-style uptick in cases.Per the U.S. CDC’s COVID data tracker, BA.2 accounted for about 55% of new cases, for the week ending 3/26/2022.

If there’s any link between BA.2 and the regional patterns of increase and decrease shown on the chart above, it’s not obvious at a glance.

Source: CDC COVID data tracker

Cases are rising rapidly in the Northeast, which has a high proportion of BA.2.  Cases are falling rapidly in the Pacific region, which also has a high proportion of BA.2.  Whatever the impact of BA.2 is in the U.S., it doesn’t appear to be a prime driver of new case growth so far.

 

 

U.S. COVID-19 cases were up 3 percent over the past seven days, thus ending a 60-day streak of consecutive declines.

That said, we’re still at just over 9 new cases per 100K per day, far below most of the industrialized world.

Continue reading Post #1470: COVID-19, finishing out the data reporting week, rebound begins.

 

The U.S. still stands at just over 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day.  There has been no net change in the past seven days. Continue reading Post #1469: COVID-19 trend to 3/24/2022: Hitting bottom, expecting a rebound

 

The U.S. is now at 9.3 new cases per 100K population per day.  That’s just about where we were seven days ago, and it’s a little bit of an uptick from the very lowest rate seen in the past seven days.  I don’t want to read too much into that, but cases are now flat-to-up in four of the six regions on the graph below. Continue reading Post #1468: COVID-19 trend to 3/23/2022, now flat-to-up.

 

For the fifth day running, the U.S. shows just over 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day.  Over the past 7 days, the new case rate fell just 7%.  My guess is, this is as good as it gets, for now.

---

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 3/22/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page 3may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

Looking forward, we have a few countervailing forces at work now.

On the one hand, the continued spread of son-of-Omicron (BA.2) and continued decline in all sorts of COVID-19 hygiene suggest rates will rise from here.

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker

Source:  Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast.  Comment in red is mine.

On the other hand, I think the weather is in our favor.  Everyone expect a strong seasonality to COVID-19 in the U.S., both because it has shown winter peaks two years running, and because most other coronaviruses also peak in the wintertime.

I’ve been showing a graph of this-year-versus-last year, starting with the start of the U.S. pandemic.  Now let me shift that to calendar years, so you can see what I’m talking about.

It’s tough to see the pure seasonality of it because we have not reached a steady-state.  Variants kept changing.  Each successful new COVID-19 variant generated its own wave, overlaying any seasonal pattern that might exist.  The level of population immunity keeps changing, both from vaccination and prior infection.

But let me try to abstract from all that by doing the lowest-of-the-low data analysis:  fitting a polynomial trend.  In this case, since my point is to try to boil this down to simple seasonality over the year, I’m going to fit a quadratic.  That’s just enough to give me one peak and one trough, if that’s what the data suggest.

Here are 2020 and 2021, with a quadratic trend fitted, trying to boil the data down to a simple seasonal pattern.  On this log-scale chart, you get a remarkbly similar trend line, despite major differences in the actual progress of case counts over the year.  In 2022, for example, we had both the Alpha and Delta waves, and the start of the Omicron wave.

 

And now here’s 2022 actual data through the most current day, plotted against those two “seasonality” quadratic curves from the prior years:

My sole point here is that the apparent seasonality of COVID-19 in the U.S. should be working to depress new case counts now.

Or, more simply, for the past two years running, the lowest case counts occurred mid-June, the highest ones occurred mid-January.  If that keeps up, then the forces of seasonality are in our favor.

 

The U.S. now stands at 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day.  Plus or minus a little statistical noise, that’s where it’s been for the past four days.  In all likelihood, I’d guess that we’ve now reached the bottom of our Omicron wave.

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 3/22/2022, 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

Obviously, one way to deal with this is to declare victory.  Particularly if this is as good as it gets.

But a thoughtful person might be keeping an eye on the U.K., where they are going straight from their Omicron wave into their son-of-Omicron (BA.2) wave.  At present, the incidence of new cases there is 20 times the level seen in the U.S.:

Source:  Johns Hopkins data via Google search.

But the good news for the U.S. is that there’s still no sign of an upturn in new case rates, even among the states that reached their Omicron wave peaks first.  The graph below divides states into five groups based on the date on which their Omicron case rate peaked.  There’s about a two-week difference in peak date between the early-peak states and the late-peak states.  And yet, the only difference is that the latest-peak states continue to show falling new-case rates.  All the other categories merely show a stable rate for the past week or so.

 

The upshot is that whatever is happening in the U.K. (and Australia, below), isn’t happening in the U.S., yet.

Source:  Johns Hopkins data via Google search.

One surprise from today’s data is that son-of-Omicrion (BA.2), the more-contagious variant of Omicron, is not spreading as fast as expected in the U.S.  As of the most recent CDC data published today, that still only accounted for about a third of new cases.  New case rates in the U.K. didn’t really start to take off until BA.2 became the dominant strain (and they cancelled all of their COVID-19 hygiene mandates).

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 3/22/2022.

Plausibly, that’s related to the lack of upturn in the U.S. compared to other parts of the world.

Anyway, I look at those two bits of data — the international situation, and the slower-than-expected growth of BA.2 in the U.S., and my conclusion is that it’s still a bit early to say we’re not going to follow in the same path as the U.K.

In the U.S., we can ignore COVID-19 for the time being because it now poses a much lower total risk (for hospitalization, and probably for death) than typical seasonal flu does, for those who are vaccinated and boostered.  Really, in terms of your overall odds, it’s now less dangerous than flu.

But it’s not over yet.