Category: COVID through 2022

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

Post #1587, COVID-19, working through the Labor Day reporting glitches.

 

The apparent rate of daily new COVID-19 cases popped up today.  Most of that should be due to the usual data-reporting problems caused by holidays.  By shifting the reporting of new cases by one day, we end up with a dip-and-a-blip in the plot of new cases.  One seven-day period with too few cases, followed by one with too many.  Today’s the day for too many cases to show up.  We’ll know more about the true trend tomorrow.

Deaths and hospitalizations appear to remain on a slow downward trend.  Currently, fewer than 350 COVID-19 deaths per day, fewer than 4300 new COVID-19 hospitalizations per day.  Continue reading Post #1587, COVID-19, working through the Labor Day reporting glitches.

Post #1582, COVID-19, post-Labor Day decline (?)

 

If you’ve been following along, you know the drill at that point.  Holidays disrupt the COVID-19 numbers.  Mostly, that’s just a disruption of data reporting.  But to some smaller degree, there will typically be a drop in formally-diagnosed new cases, once all the dust has settled.  Plausibly, people who are only mildly ill will be more likely to forego a formal test if their symptoms appear on a holiday.

As a result, you have to wait a couple of days past the holiday, in the hopes that the numbers will bounce back to their true trend.

FWIW, on paper, the U.S. stands at 23 new cases per 100K per day, down three from the Friday before Labor Day.  I expect that will bounce up a bit yet, based on what appears to be under-reporting in California.

That said, reported hospitalizations are down to 4400 per day, deaths are down to 350.  Both of those are improvements over the pre-Labor-Day period.  Continue reading Post #1582, COVID-19, post-Labor Day decline (?)

Post #1580, COVID-19, finishing the data week at 26/100K/day.

 

The COVID-19 new case count continues to drift downwards, now 26 new cases per 100K population per day, down one from yesterday.

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 9/3/2022, 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

Schools and the return to normalcy.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, back-to-school for elementary and high school students seems to be having no noticeable impact on the spread of COVID-19.  Early in the pandemic, most people (including me) expected to see some increased spread of disease as students returned to school.  But, as far as I can recall, that never materialized in any uniform fashion.  Michigan schools had some problems, particularly among “high contact” populations such as football teams (Post #1077).  But for U.S. students, in general, return to class (typically masked, sometimes distanced, frequently tested) didn’t increase the spread of disease significantly above the existing background rate in the community.

For example, last year I did a pretty good “natural experiment” analysis of Virginia schools, comparing the school districts based on the staggered school year start dates.  I found exactly nothing.

Note:  This is the 2021 school year opening.

This year, our local school district (Fairfax County Public Schools) continues to track the number of reported new COVID-19 cases among elementary and high school students.  That seems like a not-unreasonable precaution.

Source:  Fairfax County Public Schools.

By contrast, there were definitely well-documented COVID-19 outbreaks at many U.S. universities.  For example, at William and Mary, which my daughter attended at the time, widespread partying last St. Patrick’s day led to a significant upturn in new cases (Post #1099).

This year, William and Mary isn’t even bothering to keep track of new cases.  Checking a few other Virginia universities, this appears to be the norm.  That seems a bit odd, as there’s still plenty of COVID-19 in circulation, and students are still apt to party.  That makes further COVID-19 outbreaks on college campuses almost a certainty.  But this year, those outbreaks will be treated no differently from flu outbreaks, annoying but not life-threatening.

And so, things return to (the new) normal.  It resembles the old normal, except that we all have to contend with permanent widespread circulation of this disease.  But now, by and large, it’s like flu, just vastly more contagious.  It continues to add to our health care costs and to the U.S. mortality rate.  (As noted in a recent post, U.S. lifespan isn’t going to return to the pre-pandemic level any time soon.)  It’s now just the way the world is.  Today’s children will eventually view COVID as part of the landscape.

Post #1579: No change in new COVID-19 cases, but an interesting finding on vaccination-after-infection.

 

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.

Post #1578: And it ain’t gonna get much better this year, by the looks of it.

 

Source:  NY Times, today.

You read it here first, in Post #1575, a few days ago.

I have nothing new to add to my prior analysis.  Based on the 2022 data to date, things aren’t going to improve much this year either.  That’s all in my prior post.

I guess the only thing I have to add is this:  If you’ve never used U.S. mortality data, you probably don’t grasp how incredibly unusual this is.  I had to study those numbers, from time to time, over the course of a 30-year career as a health economist.  If, at any time, you’d put this graph in front of me, I would have sworn that somebody screwed up the numbers.  I wouldn’t have believed it was possible.  But it’s real, and it’s not over yet.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.

Post #1575: COVID-19, now 28 new cases per 100K per day, and current all-causes mortality data.

 

The daily new case count continues extremely slow decline.  More of a drift than a trend.  In any case, U.S. now stands at 28 new cases per 100K population per day, down one from yesterday.

Hospitalizations are at about 5500 per day.  Deaths are just below 400 per day. Continue reading Post #1575: COVID-19, now 28 new cases per 100K per day, and current all-causes mortality data.