Category: COVID through 2022

All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.

Post #1642: Hallelujah! The report.

 

Background

As I sit down to do my legally-mandated Cyber Monday shopping, I’d like to talk about a somewhat-less-commercial aspect of Christmas.

Last night, my wife and I attended the 51st annual Messiah sing-along at Clarendon United Methodist Church. For those of you unfamiliar with this tradition, Messiah is a baroque oratorio about the birth and death of Christ.  The words are straight out of the King James Bible (ca. 1611).  The music is straight out of the early 18th century (ca. 1741).

Despite these handicaps, the Christmas portion of it is still widely performed at this time of year (ca. 2022). The phrase used last night was “it’s been running longer than Cats”.

Talented soloists do the hard parts, while the audience serves as the chorus.  The audience ranges from excellent singers, to people like me (I can usually make it through the notes), to folks that are mostly lost, most of the time.  But it’s all good.  If you can’t sing the 16th notes, no problem.  Just sing what you can.

In a typical year, in the Washington DC area, there are easily a half-dozen Messiah sing-alongs to choose from.  I suspect the same is true for most cities across the U.S.

I’d like to say that it’s a way for us to kick off the holiday season on a more spiritual note.  But, really, for us, it’s more about the music.

My wife and I agree that, should we ever have access to a time machine, our first act would be to go back in time and kill Katherine Kennecott Davis, thus saving the Western world from untold billions of mind-numbing parum-pa-pum-pums.

The report

We attended this sing-along for several years ending in 2019.  Every pre-COVID-year, the church was more-or-less packed.  To the point where we’d come early to make sure we could get a parking place.  There was a lot of gray hair in the audience.  And a large portion of the audience had been attending that Clarendon UMC Messiah sing-along for years, if not decades.

Choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID that we hesitated to return to it.  Even after calculating the odds (I crudely figured a 1-in-300 chance of picking up a COVID infection there), it still felt a little iffy.  I had to wonder if we were just being wimps about this.  Seems like almost everything is back to almost normal,despite continued new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that would be considered high during any other part of the pandemic.

We’re going back to this one, in the era of endemic COVID, because they require masks.  Near as I can tell, none of the other sing-alongs in the area do that.  I briefly went over why choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID-19 in my last post on this (Post #1638).  So the masks seem prudent, to me.

Turns out, we are far from alone in hesitating to return to mass choral singing.

I would guess that the church was less than half-full last night.  In addition, the church had set up a broadcast for those who wished to attend virtually.

Moreover, the composition of the audience had changed.  By eye, there was less gray hair.  By show of hands, more than half were there for the very first time.  Only a handful of persons in the audience were multi-decade veterans of this event.

In hindsight, I interpret that as showing that many of the church’s aging, veteran singers decided not to attend in person.  Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about who is most at risk.

But is nevertheless a shame.  It suggests to me that if the current new-case levels really are the “endemic” or long-term level of COVID in the population, then this event will never fully recover from the pandemic.  It’s an event that largely catered to an elderly audience, but now carries an inherently high risk of COVID-19 infection.  That’s just not a winning combination in the era of endemic COVID.

Whether or not the newcomers will eventually repopulate that sing-along, it’s far too soon to tell.  I give Clarendon UMC credit for soldiering on.  I dropped a wad of cash in the collection basket on my way out, because it can’t be cheap to hire a small orchestra plus soloists.  But unless the level of COVID in circulation falls greatly, I suspect that this will only survive in its current, greatly reduced, form.

As for the other sing-alongs in the area, my wife is uncomfortable attending unless masks are required.  The science says that singing generates as much aerosols as coughing.  In this era, do you really want to stand in a big room full of people continuously coughing, and none of them wearing masks?

Ah, yeah, I think that’s where we draw the line.  At least at the current level of COVID-19 incidence.

The issue of mandatory masks for mass choral events cuts both ways.  We wish some other Messiah sing-alongs would follow Clarendon’s lead on the issue of masks.  But, I guess, it’s a question of whether the organizers of those events figure they’d lose more audience by requiring it, than not.  Maybe with a younger audience, no mandatory masks is the attendance-maximizing decision.  Last night, though, I’m pretty sure that masks were key to the modest level of attendance that was achieved.

Post #1640: Humidifiers, first fill of the season.

 

Why humidify?

Among the many things I wish I’d never had to learn, but did, because of COVID, is the term “mucociliary clearance”.  And, hand-in-hand with that, I now understand that the standard advice to “drink plenty of fluids” when you have a cold has nothing to do with your kidneys.  That’s actually for the health of your lungs.

Your entire upper respiratory tract is lined with mucous membranes, and in addition much of the surface is lined with little hairs (cilia).  Mucous itself has substances that fight pathogens, and the cilia sweep the mucous toward the top of your throat, where you (ahem) eliminate that mucous in some fashion.

This is the primary mechanism by which your lungs protect and clean themselves.  Of anything that lands on the surface of the lungs.  Mucous traps things before they can actually get to your lung cells.  And then your lungs continuously sweep the mucous lining up toward your throat, where it gets disposed of.

And so, the whole point of “drink plenty of fluids” is to keep your mucous loose, per WebMD.

To today’s point, dry air inhibits mucociliary clearance, and humid air increases it.  (Also referenced halfway through this review article.)  And it’s not exactly rocket science to understand it:  Dry air dries out your mucous.  That slows down the rate of transport.  And so your entire upper respiratory tract functions less well at cleaning itself, and protecting itself from pathogens.

That’s why four out of five HVAC engineers agree:  Keep your indoor relative humidity between 40% and 60%.  That recommendation is based, in part, on studies like this one, of mice and flu, literally out of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) handbook:

Source:  ASHRAE.

See Post #894 for other studies, including ones using guinea pigs, and ones effectively using school children as guinea pigs.

With this latest bout of cold weather, the relative humidity in my house has finally fallen to 40%.  So I’m firing up my first humidifier today. 

After having tried many different types of humidifiers over the years, I’ve decided that I hate them all (Post #895).  Noisy, dusty, stinky, and/or expensive. Take your pick.  I have grudgingly settled on a pad-type humidifier with removable tanks as the least-hassle approach to maintaining indoor humidity.

I’ll be toting 2-gallon jugs of water for the next few months, keeping that filled.

All that, just to keep up my mucociliary clearance.

Post #1639, COVID-19 still 13/day, maybe an East/West split?

 

And, as of today, the U.S. is at 13 new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day, more-or-less the same as it has been for the past three weeks.  There’s a visible upward trend for most of the Mountain states.  And maybe the current pattern of increases and decreases mirrors the weather we were having a couple of weeks ago, with a very warm East and a fairly cold West.  (Recall that the seven-day-moving average reported today reflects infections that were occurring about two weeks ago, on average.)

Finally, data reporting has gotten so sketchy that I had to write a new algorithm to gap-fill the periods over which states fail to report.  Nobody ever cares about the statistical methods, but I figured I should state it.  In most cases, the new case counts with the new method will differ only slightly from what I was showing under the old method.

 

Continue reading Post #1639, COVID-19 still 13/day, maybe an East/West split?

Post #1638: Hallelujah! Or maybe not. Messiah sing-alongs in the era of endemic COVID.

 

Background

In the runup to Christmas, my wife and I like to attend sing-alongs of Handel’s Messiah.  That’s the one with the Hallelujah Chorus.   I posted about this in December 2019, Post #496.

Or, rather, liked.  Past tense.  That was pre-COVID.

As we learned the hard way, both here and abroad, getting together with a bunch of people and singing is probably the single easiest way to spread COVID-19.  In the U.S., the first such choral super-spreader event was the Mount Vernon, Washington choir practice, which left dozens ill and several dead.  Abroad, many countries saw similar incidents, such as this superspreader event at a church choir in Berlin.

There’s no mystery here.  COVID-19 is spread by aerosols, and singing produces as much aerosol as coughing.  From the standpoint of spreading an aerosol-borne disease, standing in the middle of a choir practice is equivalent to standing in a room full of people who are continuously coughing.

It just sounds a lot better.

Most churches all figured this out, at some point, and pretty much all mainstream U.S. churches banned singing in church during the height of the pandemic (see Post #708).  But that was only after a number of church-related super-spreader events (see Post #679).

Along with that, of course, many (but far from all) Messiah sing-alongs were cancelled for one or more years.

They’re back

A typical example of the adaptation of Messiah to COVID is the long-standing event at Clarendon United Methodist Church.  We attended for years, and it was always one of the best in the area.  The last pre-COVID year was the 2019, when they held their 48th annual sing-along.   In 2020, risks were high enough that they cancelled the in-person service, and instead offered up a retrospective on (what would have been) their 49th Messiah sing-along (reference).  In 2021, they held an in-person service for their 50th annual event, but required masks and proof of vaccination or recent negative PCR test (reference).  Finally, this year, in 2022, they are holding their 51st sing along, with masks required (reference).

Others that we have consistently attended in the past are being offered this year, but with no requirement for masks.  To pick an example, the Reston Chorale always manages to put on a very nice rendition of Messiah.  The ads for the 2022 sing-along make no mention of any precautions (reference).

Near as I can tell, Clarendon UMC is the outlier for requiring any precautions at all.  No others that I have found in my area make any mention of a mask requirement.

So, what are the odds?

Clarendon UMC looks like it holds about 500 people.  Using the same calculation that I’ve used in the past, with our current rate of roughly 10 new cases per day per 100K population, the odds that at least one person in that crowd has an active COVID-19 infection is 36% (calculation not shown).

This should probably be moderated somewhat by this being an elderly and fairly upscale crowd.  So the true odds may be somewhat smaller than that.

Then come all the unknowables.

First, being in the same church as someone with an active case is not the same as getting infected.  Mainly because of distance, but also because my wife and I have both recently had the bivalent booster shot, so our immunity should still be pretty good.

Second, it’s not clear what the impact of the masking requirement will be.  It cuts down the risks, for sure.  And I’ll be wearing a 3M unvented N95, appropriately fitted.  But there’s no telling what the average singer will be wearing.  Or how they will be wearing it.

Finally, there’s the evidence from last year’s events.  I cannot find even a single mention of an outbreak of COVID being traced back to a Messiah sing-along.  I don’t know whether that’s because it didn’t happen, because it wasn’t traced, or because it just didn’t make the news.

If I had to roll it all up into one big explicit guess, between a) the size of the church, b) our recent booster shot, c) the age and high educational attainment of the audience, and d) N95 respirators, I’d have to guess at least a 100-fold reduction in the odds of actually acquiring a COVID-19 infection at this event. Relative to that 36% chance that somebody attending the event with have an active case of COVID.

Or maybe a one-in-300 chance of getting infected. Fully acknowledging the guesswork that went into that.  But, you know, it’s better to make a decision with some number in mind, no matter how hazily derived, then just go with a gut feeling.

And to me, right now, for something I’m going to do once a year, that number doesn’t look too awful.

So, YOLO.  And I ain’t getting any younger.  After talking it over with my wife, maybe it’s time to get out our Messiah scores and start get up to speed on our parts.

Hallelujah.

Post #1637, COVID-19, still 13/100k, Mountain states, and a couple of calculations.

 

It now definitely looks like an uptrend in new COVID-19 cases in the Mountain states.  And maybe the Midwest.  And maybe the start of an uptick in a couple of other regions.  And yet, there’s no uptrend in Canada, or in alpine Europe.  And, as of today, the U.S. remains at 13 new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day, same as it was two weeks ago.  But with an upward trend now.

Separately, I’m redoing the math to check whether or not I can dismiss the steady 3300 daily new COVID-19 hospitalizations as consisting mainly of people hospitalized with COVID, as opposed to those being hospitalized for COVID.  And the answer is no, I can’t.  The numbers just don’t work out.  Near as I can tell, we’re still seeing 3300 a day hospitalized for COVID, and 350 a day dying from COVID.  That means that COVID-19 remains far more serious than seasonal flu. Continue reading Post #1637, COVID-19, still 13/100k, Mountain states, and a couple of calculations.

Post #1633: An animated 1000 words on flu

 

Source:  CDC weekly influenza map.

This is not the worst flu season ever.

Just the worst in the past decade or so.  Here’s this week, in 2009, which was the worst flu season in about a half-century.

The CDC writeup of the 2009-2010 flu season makes interesting reading.  The severity of the 2009-2010 flu was due to a new and highly mutated strain of flu.  More-or-less nobody under age 60 had any immunity to it. Although CDC doesn’t use the term, that was the swine flu pandemic of 2009/2010.

For the U.S., CDC estimated about 275,000 hospitalizations with flu, and about 12,500 deaths from flu, during that exceptionally severe flu season.

To keep things in perspective, at current rates, for COVID, it will take about 78 days to equal that hospitalization count, and about 35 days to equal that death count.

Or, in round numbers, COVID currently amounts to about 10 swine flu pandemics per year, in terms of deaths, and about 5 swine flu pandemics per year, in terms of hospitalizations.

That’s comparing the current rates from COVID, to the worst flu season in the U.S. in roughly the last half-century.

Even now, you’ll read (e.g.) comments to news stories suggesting that COVID is no worse than flu.  The facts say otherwise.  COVID case rates will have to fall by about a factor of ten before COVID will be no worse than the worst flu season in recent history.

And, just FYI, regarding the death count, these are deaths from COVID, not merely deaths with COVID.  The U.S. CDC says this: 

  • COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it did not cause or contribute to the death (reference).
  • In at least 90% of cases, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death (reference). 
  • In the remaining cases, COVID-19 was listed as a contributing cause of death (reference). 

So, yeah, I’m still masking up when I go to the gym.

Post #1632, COVID-19, still 13/100k, no U.S. winter wave yet, maybe some action in the Mountain states

 

Still waiting for the long-anticipated Winter 2022 COVID-19 wave.  Still not seeing it.  U.S. daily new COVID 19 case count stands at 13 / 100K / day, same as the end of last week.

By region, only the graph of the Mountain states resembles any sort of organized uptick in cases.  Everything else is either not rising, or so full of reporting noise that it’s hard to see any obvious pattern. Continue reading Post #1632, COVID-19, still 13/100k, no U.S. winter wave yet, maybe some action in the Mountain states

Post #1631: More weirdness in the market for N95 masks

 

Per prior post, I’m going back to the gym wearing 3M 8511 vented 95 respirators.

Of which I only have two left.  One of which is now quite soggy from its first trip to the gym.

And, while these 3M respirators last a long time, I’ve decided to buy another box for gym use.

I think. 

I mean, I’m sure I’m buying some more vented respirators.  I’m not sure they are going to be genuine 3M masks.  A felt a little tingle in my economists’ sense when I looked over what’s currently being offered, at what price.

For 10 of these 3M 8511 masks:

  • Home Depot wants $2.80 per mask.
  • Ace Hardware wants $2.80 per mask.
  • Lowes wants $2.60 per mask.
  • No-name vendors on Amazon want about $1.80 per mask.

Makes me wonder why 3M would offer such a steep discount to a handful of no-name vendors on Amazon.  Discounts that they won’t offer to big-volume sellers like Home Depot.  All selling just a few boxes each.

Maybe this warning explains it:

Source:  Amazon.

The above is actually in one of the Amazon listings.  But there are no listings for 8511 masks shipped and sold by Amazon, right now.  All the listings for the 8511 masks are a) for tiny no-name vendors, b) with just a few boxes left, c) typically with errors in the listing.

For example, I’m pretty sure this is NOT an accurate description of what these masks are made of.

During the pandemic, 3M had a serious problem with counterfeiting.  Check out the numbers on their COVID-19 fraud page.

I’m guessing the extra-cheap masks on Amazon are the last of the COVID-19 counterfeit stock.  It’s possible that many small vendors ended up with two or three boxes of the real thing, and they’ve all decided to dump them at a steep discount.  Maybe they all bought them at a much lower price than the current price, and they’ve all decided not to make some extra profit by raising their prices.

But if I had to guess, despite the positive comments on Amazon, I’d guess these are COVID-19 counterfeit stock, trickling out into the marketplace via Amazon.

So I’m off to Home Depot for what I sincerely hope will be my last-ever purchase of N95 respirators.

Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.

 

I’m old, fat, and have a tough time handling respiratory infections. I haven’t had COVID so far, and I really don’t want to catch it. 

Prevalence of COVID-19 is now about 10 times higher than the first time my wife and I returned to the gym (Post #1163).  But (arguably) lower than when we returned to the gym a second time (Post #1421).  At some level, the risk of going to the gym or not cuts both ways.  It’s a question of what else is going to kill me if I don’t manage to get my heart rate up on a regular basis.  So back to the gym it is.

The bottom line is that I’m going to wear a mask.  No matter how unfashionable that has become.

Not because I’m stubborn, but because I bothered to calculate the odds.  And the decision to go back to the gym, three times a week, will almost certainly expose me to an individual with an active COVID infection, over the course of the year.  Not to mention flu.  Exposure isn’t infection, but still, this is likely going to be the riskiest thing I do in the near term. Continue reading Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.