Tag: flu

Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

 

A man with one watch knows the time.  A man with two watches is never quite sure.

And so it goes with methods to impute the “true” counts of official new COVID-19 cases, based on the increasingly sketchy reporting.  I now have two methods for doing this — neither of which is without flaws — and both are telling me that, out of the blue, U.S. new case counts are now rising. Continue reading Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

 

It seems as if “tripledemic” has finally been dropped by the news media.  For the simple reason that COVID is failing to play its part.  Near as I can tell, there’s still no trend in new cases, we’re way past the point where prior winter waves started, and there’s nothing happening in Canada.

Like so:

Continue reading Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

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 #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