2021 has been good. So far as I can tell, I’m Covid free through Christmas. Fingers crossed!
As you all know, I hope the auguries for a less virulent Omicron are true, and that with vaccines for the new spikes and treatments for the ill, and we’ll all be set free to circulate at will next year. (Not that I’ve exactly been cloistering.)
621 thoughts on “Merry Christmas 2021.”
Comments are closed.
Happy Christmas (happy holidays, season’s greetings, etc.} to all !
From an older gentleman who has not been dancing of late, but also not cloistering (more than normal), I will second the New Year’s wishes of Lucia. Happy holidays.
Hilarious framing from The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/liberals-conservatives-wrong-about-each-other/620996/
.
“But supporters of police abolition are the exception, not the rule, on the American left, according to research that my colleagues Matthew Feinberg, Alexa Tullett, Anne E. Wilson, and I conducted. In late October 2020, we asked more than 1,000 people in the United States whether they agreed that “police departments are irreversibly broken and racist, so the government needs to get rid of them completely.†Only 28 percent of the self-described liberals even somewhat agreed, indicating that this was not a solid consensus on the left.
Although far out of step with what most liberals actually thought, Carlson’s sampling of liberal views was emblematic of what conservatives believed about liberals. Conservatives in our sample estimated that 61 percent of liberals—more than twice the actual number—endorsed the abolition of law enforcement. This is a striking example of what plagues our politics: a false polarization in which one side excoriates the other for views that it largely does not hold.â€
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/liberals-conservatives-wrong-about-each-other/620996/
.
Hey left leaning media … what could possibly have given conservatives the idea most liberals wanted to eliminate police departments? Could it be relentless coverage of people saying exactly this by large media outlets like The Atlantic? Yes. What a laugher. Framing this as a failure of conservatives to understand the left is quite the stretch. “Only†28% of liberals want the government to eliminate police, I can think of some other ways to frame that statistic. Not to mention the extreme way the question was phrased in an obvious attempt to skew the results.
.
Heal thyself physician.
South Africa finally got a surge in deaths to go with their surge in Omicron cases. It looks like it *might* have peaked, about 9 days after their peak in cases (now dropping nearly as fast as they rose). That delay would be roughly consistent with earlier surges in South Africa. If deaths have peaked (time will tell), then the CFR is a bit under 0.3%; that is a full order of magnitude lower than in previous waves.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208202)
I believe the views of the self-identified liberals and conservatives in that The Atlantic article are probably close to actual views of those different politically affiliated individuals, but what actually gets people’s attention and can affect their views is what the politicians and media are saying about topical issues which can change with the political winds. Another unfortunate effect in this matter is the partisan individuals who might have a view that changes based on what their party’s and opposition party’s current views are. There is also the matter of partisans and voters in general being more against the opposition party than favoring the one they vote for.
Interesting that Trump is for vaccinations and the media talks about Trump voters against vaccinations. I strongly suspect that Trump’s interest in this matter has to do with his administration’s involvement in the rollout of the vaccinations. I am wondering if Trump’s recent statements will change the minds of any of his voters or those of the media.
Kenneth,
“I am wondering if Trump’s recent statements will change the minds of any of his voters or those of the media.”
.
Maybe a few of his voters, but the MSM? Not a chance; if Trump spent the rest of his life acting like Gandhi, the MSM would still be calling him a Nazi racist on his deathbed.
.
I suspect the true difference in vaccination rates between Trump voters and non-trump voters is not all that large, at least among people who are at significant risk (mainly those over 60).
Ummmm … yeah … NYT:
.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the Omicron variant now accounts for roughly 59 percent of all Covid cases in the United States, a significant decrease from the agency’s previous estimate. The update shows how hard it is to track the fast-spreading variant in real time and how poorly the agency has communicated its uncertainty, experts said.
Last week, the C.D.C. said that Omicron accounted for approximately 73 percent of variants circulating in the United States in the week ending Dec. 18. But in its revision, the agency said the variant accounted for about 23 percent of cases that week.â€
““I just want people to be very aware that that is an estimate, that’s not actually from sequence-confirmed cases,†said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.”
.
W … T … F? Not a confidence builder. This is an egregious error. This is clearly a termination offense for whoever OK’d that release. This looks very, very, bad. Incompetence.
.
As SteveF pointed out, the crazy fast reduction in delta should have been a red flag. You can put me in Mike M’s defund the CDC camp at least for today.
Tom Scharf
Yep. It’s not like red ants and black ants fighting each other off. Omicron can’t go out and actually kill delta!
.
Omicron is multiplying faster. Let’s hope it’s milder. But killer Δ is still out there!
Tom Scharf,
Bureaucrats are never fired, no matter how incompetent.
.
Any sensible person looking at the situation on Dec 18 knew the CDC estimate of 73% of all new cases was wildly, impossibly high, and was for certain wrong. But bureaucrats are never sensible, and most are utter fools like Fauci. So out the garbage information goes, without end.
.
What we clearly have is an omicron surge superimposed on an existing delta surge; in most places there is great overlap, but in a few places (like Florida) the delta surge was over before the omicron surge started; Florida is where we will get to clearly judge the virulence of omicron, and it won’t take long. Places like NJ, PA, and upstate NY, which were already in the middle of the delta surge when omicron arrived, will never allow a clean evaluation of omicron.
.
I think the best we can hope for is that the faster spreading but less deadly omicron strain will give more people resistance to the delta strain,and so shorten the delta surge somewhat.
I agree that most people were never in favor of eliminating the police, every actual poll I saw said that exact thing. The media coverage was misleading, and I would allege it was intentionally misleading to push a preferred narrative, get clicks, etc. The views from the majority were left without representation on many networks. It took a series of political losses and reversals (VA, NYC, etc.) for the media to now try to repair the damage.
“that’s not actually from sequence-confirmed cases”
.
I am having a really hard time with this statement. I definitely was assuming this estimate was sourced from actual data. Why wouldn’t it be? Is this not their actual job? They really need to explain this. I just don’t see this as a minor error. I’m not interested in some CDC employee’s potentially wildly inaccurate estimate, show me the data. Credibility should rightfully suffer (even more) here.
Harry Reid has died.
I will spend some time looking for something positive to remember about him.
SteveF (Comment #208206)
Steve, I really do not mind the media bashing Trump. He is after all a politician, and while I did not like to generalize, politicians as a group need constant bashing.
My problem with the media is that there are politicians on the left that they hero worship or look away from when they say something stupid or offensive. I have noticed they are handling Biden with kid gloves and feeding him questions that require only a short and simple answer. They are not above prompting him when he fumbles.
I agree the CDC should be mostly defunded, not so much for incompetence as for political bias. At a minimum, it should be ‘decapitated’, with only the most basic data gathering functions remaining and everything else eliminated. (like removing all higher functions from HAL the demonic computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey) There is no need for analyses which are both usually wrong and designed to support a favored political narrative (and those two are tightly linked, of course). The CDC, like nearly all Federal bureaucracies, is little more than an arm of the Democrat party, and the nonsense it feeds the public on covid shows that clearly.
mark boffill,
‘I will spend some time looking for something positive to remember about him.’
.
You might as well look for unicorns. The guy did terrible damage to both the Senate and the country. He was a corrupt liar to the core.
Steve,
It’s true that I’ve come up with precious little so far.
Kenneth,
“My problem with the media is that there are politicians on the left that they hero worship or look away from when they say something stupid or offensive. I have noticed they are handling Biden with kid gloves and feeding him questions that require only a short and simple answer. They are not above prompting him when he fumbles.”
.
I doubt it is hero worship, more like explicit political support for leftist policies. Biden is a corrupt, life-long career politician who is now nothing more than an Alzheimer’s addled old man being controlled by leftist hacks. He is nothing like a hero. The MSM will toss him under the bus the instant he no longer serves the ‘greater purpose’ of advancing leftist policies. If I sound cynical, it is only because I have watched the bias and outright dishonesty of the MSM for decades.
I did some analysis of Covid-19 cases, deaths to cases and positive and total PCR tests for Covid-19. I found an interesting relationship between weekly PCR tests and deaths/cases ratios. I used that relationship in a nonlinear regression and extrapolation to estimate a deaths to cases ratio of 0.013. The writeup and plots from the analysis are in the link below.
I will be using that ratio as a reference point for the omicron variant when sufficient cases and lag times for deaths occur. I believe the large amount of PCR testing now occurring and probably increasing in the future will allow a better estimate of deaths to cases for omicron infections.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1bhrj2lf2dyoewy/Covid_19_Cases_vs_Test_PosTest_PortionPositive.pdf?dl=0
SteveF (Comment #208217)
I too have seen the majority of the mainstream media favoring leftist politicians for much longer than most people realized and the many who continue not to realize or perhaps not want to realize. You have Fox News and some radio commentators on the right but that is a small minority.
The one lasting and major push by the left and their media friends is that we have a problem or better an emergency and only the government can solve it.
For hero worship by the media I was thinking more of an Obama and now a Fauci. FDR is of course the number one hero to be worshipped and forevermore. The Kennedy’s were back in the day but are slowly being forgotten. Jimmy Carter still gets some occasional attention. Clinton was lionized until womanizing became unpopular. Johnson’s War on Poverty stills gets favorable press even though it was a failure and of course not so admitted by the press.
The real sadness is John Madden died. It’s hard to not like him.
.
Harry Reid’s crowning achievement was taking all the money and federal investment for Yucca Mtn in Nevada and then not allowing it to be used, ha ha. Perfectly played for Nevada.
.
Fox News exists and succeeds based almost solely on the moral sellout of the legacy media. It used to be journalism was more of a blue collar profession, now it is made up almost entirely of white collar people from the same socioeconomic class and a set of shared values that have been narrowing for quite a while. Their open disparagement of flyover country and the south is reflected in their trust ratings.
Another totally unscientific analysis from someone with no training or professional credentials in Public Health [me!]….. Using CDC data for Florida and plotting Daily Cases on the left axis and Currently Hospitalized Covid Patients on the right axis tells me Omicron is not a great threat in Florida. I have said for about two weeks that any spike we get in Florida was going to be exclusively Omicron and I still assume that. What is curious is that the start date and slope of the hospitalization curve is much different this time around. In the previous spikes it mirrored the case curve. This time it is 10 days delayed and a much more gradual slope. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases_currenthospitaladmissions NOTE: You have to manually set the state [Florida].
mark bofill,
I had a thought about an appropriate end for Harry Reid: He should be buried in Yucca mountain next to a bunch of nuclear waste.
Russel,
I’m not sure the peak in Florida is delayed. I’m not sure it’s been reached.
Lucia, I wrote that “the start date and slope of the hospitalization curve is much different this time around”. It’s obvious from the curves that the peak is some time off. My prediction that “Omicron is not a great threat in Florida” is based on comparing this episode with previous ones and I stand by that.
Curious why people simply assume that the vaxxed and unvaxxed have the same health profiles as groups. It’s an extraordinary assumption and is contradicted by the facts.
Those who are old, frail and sick cannot get the jab. They are too unhealthy for their doctors to approve it. Including these people in the unvaxx category is guaranteed to skew the numbers ridiculously.
We should be comparing healthy vaxxed with healthy unvaxxed. Compare apples to apples. Adding those with one foot in the grave with the healthy unvaxxed to compare with the healthy vaxxed is a deliberate effort to misinform.
Haven’t we had enough lies by now? Those lies have done massive harm.
Steve,
Yeah. I should never have mentioned it. There isn’t much nice to say about the guy.
Rest in peace, may God have mercy on his soul… That’s about it, AFAICT.
stan (Comment #208226) Your premise is all wrong. You wrote “Those who are old, frail and sick cannot get the jab.†Well I am definitely one of those who are old, frail and sick and I got the jab as soon as my age group was eligible [ditto on the booster]. I was advised by my physician to do so. My wife is old and works for an even older physician…and they got their jabs even before I did. Your snark about “those with one foot in the grave†not getting vaccinated is just plain wrong. We were at the front of the line.
I will go back to see if I can find the doctor or scientist who was the source of that.
The point still stands. I see no reason to assume that the two groups are sufficiently similar in health profiles.
And I also see no reason to trust a health establishment’s numbers when they have lied to us relentlessly for two years. Especially when we have a number of concrete examples of the numbers being bogus.
Russell Klier (Comment #208225): “I wrote that “the start date and slope of the hospitalization curve is much different this time aroundâ€.”
.
I do not see the difference, other than that the rise in cases seems more rapid this time. Previous surges show a delay from cases to hospitalizations. The current data also shows a delay. It may well be that the rise in hospitalizations will be much smaller. But it is too soon to tell, at least not by just eyeballing it.
.
FWIW, I am guessing that there will be just 40-50% of the hospitalizations as in prior surges. I just don’t think we can say that the data show that yet.
Tom Scharf: “Harry Reid’s crowning achievement was taking all the money and federal investment for Yucca Mtn in Nevada and then not allowing it to be used, ha ha. Perfectly played for Nevada.”
The true but untold story behind the shutdown of the Yucca Mountain project is this:
Over the next hundred years, our nation’s stock of spent nuclear fuel is just as likely to be re-burned in Gen IV reactors, or to be reprocessed into new fuel, as it is to be permanently disposed of in a geologic repository.
What the advocates of nuclear power in the Department of Energy and among the staffs of the nuclear friendly Congressmen came to realize is that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) makes no sense whatsoever given how valuable our spent nuclear fuel is likely to become.
The cheapest and most cost effective means of safely managing our stock of spent nuclear fuel is to store it on the surface in dry casks where these can be continuously monitored. If a cask leaks, the fuel can be moved to a new cask, or the old cask can be overpacked.
The quickest and easiest way for the DOE and the Congress to deal with the problem that the NWPA as now written makes no sense whatsoever — and was in fact an obstacle to implementing a rational approach for managing our spent nuclear fuel — was to have Congress simply defund the Yucca Mountain project in the federal budgeting process, effectively killing the NWPA as the nation’s nuclear waste management policy.
More likely than not, our stock of spent nuclear fuel will stay right where it is for the next fifty years or so until nuclear power makes a serious comeback in the United States and a realistic policy for nuclear fuel management is then formally adopted.
stan (Comment #208226): “Those who are old, frail and sick cannot get the jab. They are too unhealthy for their doctors to approve it.”
.
An intriguing claim. I have been assuming that the frail elderly get the jab, that it does not do them much good, and they therefore make the vaccine seem less effective than it otherwise would be. I had not considered the opposite possibility, as claimed by stan. It would be interesting to know which is closer to the truth.
.
I am pretty sure that Russell is not one of the truly frail elderly. They don’t engage in activities that are as physically strenuous as gardening.
Mike M,
The older you are the lest the vaccine helps (relative to an unvaccinated person of the same age. for those over 80, the advantage is a factor of 5 in death rate. For 49-65 the vaccines reduce death rate by a factor of >25, and for those 30-49 the advantage is about a factor of 39. Of course, the absolute numbers of prevented deaths per 100,000 population rises rapidly with increasing age, even though the relative protection falls.
Spent nuclear fuel distributed around the US makes no sense from a terrorism prevention perspective. Realistically throwing them in rusty barrels to the bottom of the ocean would likely be safe due to the dilution involved. Not saying that is a great idea, just that nuclear radiation paranoia greatly exceeds the actual threat in almost all cases, with terrorism the exception due to the scare factor. It’s the dose that matters.
SteveF (Comment #208233): “The older you are the lest the vaccine helps (relative to an unvaccinated person of the same age.”
.
Sure, but what does that mean? I doubt that age per se is the issue. It is much more likely that vaccine effectiveness depends on immune system status. Some 80 year olds have strong, well functioning immune systems. I imagine they get plenty of benefit from the vaccine. But many of the elderly have failing immune systems; they are the most vulnerable and probably don’t get much benefit from the vaccine.
.
Correlation is not causation. Yes, age correlates with vaccine effectiveness. But age also correlates with immune system status. The latter is much more likely to be the cause of reduced vaccine effectiveness.
I was pondering the opposite side of evolution selection pressure, the thought being that the evolution of the human immune system doesn’t much care if it protects the elderly as they don’t reproduce. Allowing a bunch of non-reproducers to compete for limited resources isn’t optimal. Exactly why the immune system gets worse with age isn’t obvious to me, but I think evolution either doesn’t care one way or the other, or may even be primed to make it that way.
The vaccine for the immunocompromised may be a huge deal, I’d have to see the numbers. A vaccine that changes your risk from 0.1% to 0.001% isn’t really that helpful in the grand scheme, but if it changes risk from 50% to 10% then that is a huge deal even though the relative numbers are lower. It depends on how you choose to interpret the numbers.
Mike M,
Sure, it ultimately is a failing immune response that makes the protection afforded by the vaccine fall. But most everyone’s immune system declines with age…. so it seems to me more semantics than anything else. People get old and they die, and very often they die (indirectly) from a failing immune system. I suppose a handful of the very lucky maintain a stronger immune system than most, just as a few live past 100, and those two things may well be related. I don’t plan on living to 100. You probably won’t either.
.
Old people die from covid. Young people very rarely do. You can call that correlation instead of causation if you prefer, but age is by far the best predictor of covid death
Interesting that Biden blurted out that the Federal government has no control over mitigation of Covid-19 when we saw the media and Democrats blame Trump for the the Covid-19 case and death toll. Actually in a federalist system we are supposed to have, it is the states who have major control over such matters. That made it obvious that when the past federal administration was being blamed it was a political stretch. Biden has once again retracted a statement when I suspect his political guardians so directed him to do.
In my readings and analysis I judge that politicians in general have much less control over Covid-19 than they are credited or discredited for. They do have responsibilities for the economic and emotional effects of their mandates but that part of the mitigations have been ignored or minimized.
I saw today a WSJ article referring to the Covid-19 case and death data reporting experiencing a shutdown during the Christmas holidays and than catching up after the holidays and how disconcerting this can be in journalistic analysis of the trends.
Good to hear that at least some of the media is catching onto this phenomena which has been obvious to some of us observers for a while now. It is not all that difficult to account for it if one can get over the mantra of holiday surges and look at the longer term trends and cycles.
Tom Scharf,
“I was pondering the opposite side of evolution selection pressure, the thought being that the evolution of the human immune system doesn’t much care if it protects the elderly as they don’t reproduce. Allowing a bunch of non-reproducers to compete for limited resources isn’t optimal.”
.
There is selective advantage to have grandparents help with the raising of grandchildren, and to have people live long enough to accumulate useful knowledge which they can pass on. It is clear that reproduction stops long before people become very old, and from a selective pressure POV that makes perfect sense: older parents are less likely to be successful in raising children to maturity.
.
That said, I think for most of human history, almost all died long before old age diminished their immune systems. So selective pressures on human lifespan may be muted…. maximum lifespan wasn’t so very important when most people died before 40.
Tomorrow OSHA (and the Biden administration) are required to reply before the SC to the requests for emergency relief from the OSHA vaccine mandate. I am interested to read what they say, and even more interested in whether the SC will immediately stay the OSHA mandate pending a full hearing of the case before the 6th Circuit panel of three judges. If the SC stays the OSHA mandate, then for practical purposes the mandate is dead, since that will signal the mandate can’t proceed until the SC considers appeals from whatever the 6th circuit court panel rules…. putting a final decision near the the end of the OSHA ’emergency’ 6 month period.
.
IMO the suggestion the OSHA vaccine mandate is in some way an ’emergency’ is laughable. The vaccines have been available to every adult for 6 months. A very reasonable question is: “How is it that there was no ’emergency’ until the administration realized that some people simply would not get the vaccine? If it were truly an emergency, why wait 6 months? The answer is (of course) it is nothing like an emergency; it is a bald faced effort to force reluctant people to get vaccinated. If the Biden administration succeeds in forcing people to get vaccinted, I predict it will not end well for Democrats in 2022 and 2024…. a large fraction of those forced to get vaccinated will be black, and they are unlikely to forget.
.
The pandemic is winding down, with each ‘wave’ of infections less deadly that the wave before. Add to that the reality vaccinated people are also passing around covid (especially the omicron strain), and the OSHA mandate case ought to be laughed out of the SC. Unfortunately I doubt it will be.
SteveF: “a large fraction of those forced to get vaccinated will be black”
.
I suspect selective enforcement.
DaveJR,
I hope not. Selective enforcement would be plainly illegal. Of course, that has never stopped Biden before… in his public or private actions.
SteveF
I read of a restrospective study of grandmothers based on a Quebequoi community back some amount of time. (100 years?). Grandmothers presence was an advantage up to a certain age of the grandmother. After that, their presence was a disadvantage. I suspect the switch had to do with declining health and becoming an economic burden to the family caring and feeding an infirm person. I don’t remember the age– but given generational times, when the grandmother was approaching great-grandmother age the average effect was not helpful.
.
I haven’t read any grandfather studies. 🙂
Lucia,
“I haven’t read any grandfather studies”
.
Well, I can tell you anecdotally that grandfathers don’t seem to get as much respect WRT “advantage” as grandmothers do. ;-0
.
No way for me to tell if that is deserved or not. I am not near great-grandfather age.
Lucia,
OK, I take that back. There are obviously great-grandfathers of my age (71), just not so many in the USA.
Here’s another cheap drug that has been reported to improve COVID-19 outcomes. One advantage is that it can’t be called horse dewormer.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-fluvoxamine-the-covid-miracle-drug-we-have-been-waiting-for-oral-pill-cheap-hospitalization-11640726605?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Still seems like small numbers and too much anecdotal, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for a large scale properly controlled trial. Maybe if you want it, you can claim to be OCD.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-prosecute-jan-6-capitol-rioters-government-tests-novel-legal-strategy-11640786405
“In the riot’s wake, prosecutors searched for tools to elevate some of the cases beyond the misdemeanor charges often applied for unruly but far less momentous Capitol protests. They turned to a provision in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted after the accounting-fraud scandal and collapse of Enron, which imposes a potential 20-year sentence on those convicted of obstructing an “official proceeding.†The measure expanded what counts as obstruction and closed loopholes used by people involved in the Enron fraud.”
.
So Capital protesters are getting “innovative” up-charges and Portland protesters get misdemeanor charges dropped without review. This reeks of political judgment. I would be quite wary of this type of maneuver if I was a judge.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday sharply revised its estimate of omicron infections in the United States.
While the omicron variant has plagued the Biden administration with chaos, the CDC has revised their estimates of exactly how many coronavirus infections are due to the variant.
The CDC guessed the omicron variant accounted for 73 percent of all cases during the week ending December 18. On Tuesday, the number for that week was reduced to 22.5 percent, a massive reduction from 73 percent two weeks ago.
see
Andrew P (Comment #208112)December 21st, 2021 at 3:47 pm
That 73% has 60% error bands on it. If you turn the “NowCast†off Delta jumps to 98% “Nowcast is a model that estimates more recent proportions of circulating variants and enables timely public health action. â€
SteveF (Comment #208095 December 21st, 2021 at 10:21 am
angech,
Yes, it is almost certainly due to garbage data.
angech,
With the CDC, guess is the operative word. I suspect that the same people who fouled up the COVID-19 test kit in early 2020 are still employed and have probably been promoted. Btw, at the same time as the CDC test kit fiasco, the FDA was putting road blocks in the way of private companies developing tests. You can’t make this stuff up.
And the bias against Florida at NBC News at least still continues. While reporting on a record number of new cases yesterday, the comment was that 10% of the cases came from FL. Meanwhile, NY with a smaller population had nearly 15% of the cases. Adjusted for population, NY had 3,456 new cases/million and FL had 2,184 new cases/million. That’s 58% more cases/million in case you were wondering, which NBC Hews clearly wasn’t.
Edit: And in Europe, UK and France both have higher new case rates/million than FL.
DeWitt,
Of course. Florida is run by a republican governor and republican legislature. They can do no right. New York is run by a Democrat governor and democrat legislature. They can do no wrong…. or at least no wrong which can be reported on. The bias is blatant, willful, and utterly dishonest. The MSM has been this way since at least the presidency if Reagan, but worse since Obama ran for office. It is not going to get better.
Here’s today’s public health advisory from someone with no public health credentials [me!]: Amazon is still selling covid rapid test kits [two week delivery delay]. Everybody else I tried is out of them. We have one kit (2 tests) on hand and I just ordered another. CVS and other drive throughs in my area are swamped. The failure to have a stockpile of cheap rapid tests ready for a big episode like Omicron is the biggest Government FUBAR in a two year stretch of fiascos.
An aside about testing… The current covid case spike is drastically under reporting the actual situation in the country. The lack of conventional testing and the rise of at-home tests means the reported numbers are not comparable to previous data. This is exacerbated by people not bothering to get tested because this version is so mild. Better to just consult with Dr. Smirnoff and stay home.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208250)
Tom, I believe the thinking on this seeming discrepancy in how these different events are viewed by those on the left and others has to do with the thought that the state has primacy here in protecting itself and in deciding what and how it will deal (differently) with transgressors in private and public matters. This thinking is borne out in the congressional hearings and other political comments.
In my view the perpetuators of violence in the public and private property cases need to be adjudicated by the same standards and in these cases not using the kid gloves approach used in the private case. I would not be at all surprised by a judge ruling with the primacy of the state in mind.
DeWitt,
NY was in a delta variant surge when omicron arrived; hence the higher total cases. I expect the two surges will run pretty much independently, with the omicron dropping more quickly than the delta. The pattern is the same pretty much everywhere that delta was ongoing (UK, France, etc).
.
The covid madness continues. I was reading this morning that Cornell (which has required both complete vaccination and constant mask wearing for all students and staff, about 30,000 in total) has had a surge of omicron:
“As of Friday, Cornell University had 1,442 positive cases of COVID-19 this week according to the university’s COVID-19 website. Despite a 97% vaccination rate on campus, the university said it had reported a spike in cases and evidence of the omicron variant in a significant number of the positive results.”
.
~5% infected in one week. What is the response from Cornell? Move all activities “on-line” where possible, close libraries, discourage all social contact, discourage eating in dining halls (grab some food and eat in your room), and require a vaccine booster for all students and staff ASAP. IOW, keep doing all the things that haven’t work so far, only do them harder.
.
It seems to me the administration of Cornell is so stupid they can’t deal with reality in a rational way. I can’t say I am at all surprised.
SteveF (Comment #208259)
The one item that I would judge might help infections is a booster shot and was wondering how many of the currently reported cases were for individuals who were already boostered. Of course, booster shot administering now might not be affective until the surge has passed. Also wonder what are the levels of symptoms of those currently infected. That is a fairly large sample size of young adults.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208234): “Spent nuclear fuel distributed around the US makes no sense from a terrorism prevention perspective. Realistically throwing them in rusty barrels to the bottom of the ocean would likely be safe due to the dilution involved. Not saying that is a great idea, just that nuclear radiation paranoia greatly exceeds the actual threat in almost all cases, with terrorism the exception due to the scare factor. It’s the dose that matters.”
.
It’s been said that “perception is reality.” What if we look at arguments based in logic rather than in perception.
.
In 2010 when the Yucca Mountain project was in the process of shutting down, it was my opinion that using an underground repository for interim storage of spent nuclear fuel for fifty or a hundred years while the merits of reprocessing and reuse were being debated was an exceptionally stupid policy, given that (1) interim storage on the surface was both safe enough and also much more cost effective as an interim method; and that (2) there was every possibility the spent fuel would be retrieved and reused, even if this happened decades in the future.
.
A colleague made the counter-argument that spending enormous sums of money for using Yucca Mountain as interim storage for spent nuclear fuel made sense because it eliminated the threat of terrorism.
.
This was my response: If spent nuclear fuel being stored at plant sites is in fact a more tempting target for terrorists than is spent fuel being stored in a centralized national repository, then it follows logically that the operating nuclear plants where that spent fuel is now being stored are equally tempting targets for terrorists and must therefore be shut down.
.
The use of wind, solar, and nuclear for power generation is strictly a public policy decision. In the absence of low and zero carbon mandates, the electricity marketplace would move decisively towards gas-fired generation.
.
The single largest obstacle to the adoption of nuclear power as energy security backup for other power generation methods is the demonstrated lack of commitment by senior managers inside the nuclear industry for getting their new-build capital costs under control.
Beta Blocker,
Good luck with that. A lot of those costs are not under their control. The major variable cost is interest. That adds up because the government allows for indefinite delays due to the many opportunities to file objections. Just one of which is that in the US, every nuclear power plant is a one-off so the same objections can be raised for each and every one. And the PUC’s require interest to accumulate until the plant goes on line and is producing revenue. When a plant that could be built in four or five years without interference actually takes twelve plus years, that’s a lot of interest.
Then there’s the ‘nuclear is too expensive’ argument. The standard of comparison is, of course, a combined cycle natural gas plant, not wind and solar with sufficient backup to make a reliable 24/7/300+ (allowing some down time for maintenance) power source. But the greens aren’t going to allow those plants to be built either.
SteveF,
Nor am I. The Ivory Tower has never been much constrained by the reality the rest of us have to live with. Only someone out of touch with reality would think that effectively putting a quota on Asian admissions was a good idea. The problem is that it’s bleeding over into the real world, see DEI at ‘woke’ corporations, for example.
angech,
From my above post:
That’s still going on, btw.
SteveF,
Bernard Goldberg published Bias in early 2001 and Arrogance in 2003. What he recounts had been going on for his entire 28 year career at CBS News. So yes, it’s been going on since before Reagan.
For a while you could sort of blame it on groupthink because everyone around them thought the same way. But since Obama, it’s not merely groupthink, it’s being done on purpose for a specific objective when at least some of the journalists probably know better.
As far as cancel culture being a modern invention, Goldberg didn’t write his books until after he left his CBS job, IIRC.
Here is evidence from Florida that omicron is much less likely to result in hospitalization:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article256878197.html
.
The “with” covid admissions ought to be proportional to cases in the general population, so the proportion of “due to” to “with” should be proportional to the probability of hospitalization. From what I have seen, prior strains led to about 30% “with”. That going up to 60% would correspond to a 70% reduction in the probability of hospitalization. More if any significant fraction of cases in Florida are earlier strains.
DeWitt,
Sure, people like Dan Rather have been little better than lying sacks of dogsh!t from long before Reagan’s years in office. He knowingly falsified a story abut Dallas schoolchildren ‘cheering’ when they heard Kennedy had been shot. In fact, and as Rather knew full well, they cheered being sent home early, and were completely unaware of why they were being sent home early. Rather’s boss wanted to fire him on the spot for willful, politically motivated dishonesty, but was over-ruled by CBS management. He was a liar his entire career, and remains one to this day. He should have been flipping burgers, not falsifying news stories to advance a leftist political agenda.
.
But Rather was the revolting exception not the rule. There were a lot more honest journalists before the Reagan presidency. When Reagan actually stopped leftward movement (drastically reducing taxes!) MSM journalists never forgave and never forgot. There are now very few honest journalists, and none in the MSM I am aware of.
Article on how the FDA is slow walking new rapid test kits.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-rapid-test-shortages-seen-compounded-by-slow-federal-action-11640860212?st=7mqlw1z8nmrx0rc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Finally getting some mild real anxiety up.
Friend and family came down with covid within 60 hours of contact with a new case [undiagnosed at that time]
11 family members all positive in 5 days from the pre Christmas family party.
Probably delta, immunized adults, all doing well though fever cough runny nose early in illness.
Had coffee with my friend one day before his contact, not after. Still OK.
We are allowed to have a booster at 4 months instead of 6 months now.
How the rules change when convenient and needed.
Happy new year all.
angech,
good luck
angech,
Hoping for the best for your family!
All going well.
Thanks.
I should explain better .Dif not mean to mislead.
Friend and [his ] family came down with covid within 60 hours of contact with a new case [undiagnosed at that time].
Terribly sorry to give wrong impression.
My family is fine.
A little early to tell for certain, but deaths in S. Africa from omicron look to be at least a factor of 4 lower than earlier variants. S Africa has a relatively young population and relatively few people are vaccinated, so drawing conclusions from the S Africa data is dubious. Still, a factor of 4 lower in deaths relative to cases, if it holds for the USA, would imply a CFR (based on diagnosed cases) in the USA in the range of 0.2%. If vaccination makes omicron less severe, then the CFR could be well below 0.2%. Still have to wait another week for Florida death data from omicron to start showing up.
.
I noted that the ‘omicron surge’ in Spain, France, and the UK appear to have not moved their reported deaths much; the existing delta strain in looks to be mainly responsible for killing people in those places, not omicron.
A confounder here is the UK experience with late delta, they had a much lower death rate than most delta countries before omicron showed up as I recall. Whether this is due to more testing, more immunity, different age profile, etc. is up for debate. I never saw an explanation of why this death rate was lower. So it’s possible whatever lowered the delta rate in the UK is now happening elsewhere with omicron. A counter argument is that the UK also appears to be getting lower severe disease with omicron relative to even their late delta rate.
You cannot make this stuff up. NYC using explicit racism to distribute covid treatments:
“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19”
.
That isn’t going to last 5 minutes in a court challenge I hope. It’s hard to understand why there is an exodus out of NY towards the south, you know, where all the racists live. How could this be?
Omicron may kind of suck, but I think we can all be grateful that this variant being way more transmissible somehow combined with being less virulent. Omicron will dominate the world and then we will see omicron variants which one hopes will continue the less virulent status. It’s hard to call this “lucky” but worse outcomes were possible.
Tom Scharf
Heaven forfend I should say it’s going to be “like the flu”. (For a while saying it’s like flu was code-word for saying it didn’t make you sick, which is not what I mean at all.)
.
I think it will be like the flu in the sense that new meaningfully different variants will emerge. Some will take an animal intermediary pathway; some will be mutations directly in humans. Some will be more virulent, some less. Health agencies will monitor which strains are circulating and we’ll get fresh vaccines each year. Some people will take them; some people won’t. Most strains will tend to give partial immunity to many other strains. Do over time, we’ll get fewer pandemics, or to the extent that everyone is getting sick they’ll mostly not get so sick.
.
If Omicron turns out to be what it looks like– which is less deadly, more infectious and gives pretty good immunity to delta, we are entering the official “endemic” and “not too horrible” stage. Hope we are.
.
I’ll still be glad to take any future vaccine they come up with that is intended to give good immunity to different or, better yet, multiple variants. I strongly suspect such a vaccine will be here within 2 years.
lucia (Comment #208280): “I think it will be like the flu in the sense that new meaningfully different variants will emerge.”
.
There is no reason to believe that. Influenza is a rapidly mutating virus; coronaviruses mutate slowly. A reasonable expectation is that the Wuhan virus will behave very like the other endemic coronaviruses.
One possibility of why viruses become less virulent over time: It’s hard to kill a host that has a sophisticated immune system, many things most go “right” to kill the host. Most random mutations will tend to make the virus less adept at killing the host because of the many things that most go right. After the initial outbreak among a naïve population a variant must have a lot of new mutations to spread effectively against the immunized population. The new mutation set will probabilistically make it less virulent.
.
This ignores the possible positive correlation between changes necessary for increased transmission among an immunized population and increased lethality. This is unknown to me. As long as there isn’t a strong correlation here then it would seem logical that virulence would decrease, especially if it was already particularly “accidentally” virulent. A laboratory optimized lethal virus would then tend to mutate toward less virulence.
Tom Scharf,
“Most random mutations will tend to make the virus less adept at killing the host because of the many things that most go right.”
.
Not sure I can see that. As discussed on earlier threads, virulence and rate of transmission do not seem to me to be very closely related. At low fatality rates, and covid has relatively low fatality rates, there just doesn’t seem to me to be any selective advantage (or disadvantage) for the virus if it ultimately kills the host…. unless the death is so rapid that it infers a lower chance of spread.
.
Efficiency of spread is another story, and greater rate of spread is clearly favored, especially if that includes the ability to bypass existing immunity from earlier strains or vaccines. Delta appears to have been *both* moderately more efficient at spreading and more efficient at killing. Initial data indicate omicron is much more efficient at spread, but less likely to kill. I think it as likely as not we just dodged a bullet with omicron, not that higher transmission == lower fatality.
.
What humanity needs are effective (and not very expensive) anti-virals that don’t depend vaccines. And not just for covid. There is a constant ‘drain’ of viral illnesses which cost humanity dearly in lives and treasure. I think the long term objective ought to be effective anti-virals, not vaccines.
MikeM
Yes. Many told me to expect that Covid-19 would not mutate because it doesn’t mutate rapidly like influenza. And yet, here we are now, with quite a few meaningful mutations. I would have thought those who clung to this idea about Covid would have dropped it by now.
.
So yes: there is reason to believe Covid will continue to have meaningful mutations based on the fact that it has had them over the past two years.
.
Oh? So on the one hand your theory is it doesn’t rapidly mutate. But on the other hand, it’s going to mutate down to being as mild as the common cold. Or…something? You many need to be more specific about the way in which it is going to act like other endemic corona viruses. Because I honestly can’t make any sense out of this which seems to suggest that it both does and doesn’t mutate!
SteveF
Medium term I think we need both if for no other reason that we need to be practical. The anti-virals are a way off.
.
I think vaccines will always have a place. I know I like the idea of having some immunity rather than waiting to get sick, be accurately diagnosed and treated. I at least anticipate still wanting vaccines during my remaining lifetime.
Lucia,
“I think vaccines will always have a place.”
.
Sure, but if you kept a small bottle of an effective anti-viral in your medicine cabinet it would be immediately available, even if the current vaccine (a la flu vaccine) just wasn’t very effective against the current strain. When a vaccine might offer is 25% to 60% effectiveness, we clearly need a backup.
SteveF,
Well… I am back to using the iota-Carrageenan nasal spray. It got anti-viral properties and a phase III study got statistically significant protective effect as a prophylactic. The uncertainty range on efficacy was huge — but my view on that is why not? There are other studies on going.
.
But definitely, various anti-virals with action that is not specific to a variant would definitely be useful. More proven than my nasal spray would be nice too. (Let’s face it, the one study is not enough to be promoting this a-la-Ivermectin! 🙂 )
.
Having something over-the counter to treat yourself at the first signs of symptoms would be useful too. Over-the-counter means no wait.
Interesting statement here, especially considering who said it:
“But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID … And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over-counting the number of children who are, quote, ‘hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.â€
lucia (Comment #208284): “Many told me to expect that Covid-19 would not mutate because it doesn’t mutate rapidly like influenza. And yet, here we are now, with quite a few meaningful mutations.”
.
There is a huge space between “does not mutate at all” and “mutates as rapidly as influenza”. The Wuhan virus would seem to be much nearer to the low mutation rate end of that space. First, why should it be any different from the other coronaviruses? Second, it seems to have mutated very little; especially when you consider the massive amount of replications it has undergone.
.
The Wuhan virus has no doubt evolved a lot more in the last two years than the older coronaviruses. That is a result of a new virus moving into a naive population. It does not mean that it mutates faster than the older viruses.
.
lucia: “So on the one hand your theory is it doesn’t rapidly mutate. But on the other hand, it’s going to mutate down to being as mild as the common cold.”
.
I never said anything about severity. Please don’t make stuff up and attribute it to me.
.
But since you bring it up, what evidence is there that the Wuhan virus (even the earlier strains) is more virulent than the other coronaviruses? Wuhan produces mild illness in kids, just like the other coronaviruses (which may actually be worse in kids, for all I know). Wuhan can finish off those in failing health, just like the others. Yes, Wuhan has had much more impact on people in between, but that does not necessarily mean it is more virulent. It might just be a result of the fact that adults catching it did not get it as kids.
MikeM
Of course.
So? First, this may or may not be true. It is what those who assured me it wouldn’t mutate fast enough start to avoid immunity conferred by vaccines told me “way back when”. And yet, it But wherever it falls, it seems omicron somewhat evades vaccine conferred and natural immunity.
.
The issue isn’t whether it’s mutation rate is “nearer to the low mutation rate”. The issue is whether, it mutates fast enough for us to see meaningful variations “in the wild”. We have.
.
I have made no claim about whether it behaves ‘different’ from other corona viruses. And yet, I’ll point out that it obviously does. Among other things: this one kills people where the “other” ones don’t. So that’s a difference.
.
Well, you are going to have to define “very little”. I simply said “meaningful”. We’ve observed: (1) mutations that change the degree of transmissibility. (2) mutations that seem to change the level of virulence, (3) mutations that seem to affect whether one variant gives immunity relative to another.
That’s what’s meaningful. Whether there is some “number” of changes that is high or low compared to other viruses, I neither know nor care. But it’s irrelevant to the issue of what we’ll need medically going forward. What matters is whether the mutations make things more transmissible, more virulent and able to evade immunity. We’ve seen all those happen those in two years.
.
You seem to be saying it’s going to behave “like” other coronaviruses and not being any more specific. The other corona viruses result in common colds. If you want to be more specific, be more specific. Otherwise, I have no idea what you are claiming– and say in what way you think it’s going to “behave the same”.
.
Uhmmm… I should think the fact that tons of people died from Covid, but weren’t previously dying from the other endemic ones circulating among humans is evidence. Or are you being even less specific and meaning it is going to behave like the ones in bat caves? Because obviously, I can’t engage what you are actually claiming if you remain vague.
.
That would simply be a mechanisms for it being more deadly. It’s not a rebuttal to the observation that it is more deadly. That it happens to kill off old people while the other once did not kill of old people does not make it “not deadly”.
Lucia,
There was an episode in Washington state years ago when a normal coronavirus (common cold type) spread quickly in a nursing home, sickening much of the staff and killing several residents. The CDC became alarmed when a test for the original SARS virus came out positive…. making them think there was an outbreak of the original SARS. It was just due to non-specificity in the test, it wasn’t SARS.
.
The point of which is: even common cold coronaviruses kill the elderly and infirm all the time. Whether or not covid would be much less deadly if elderly people had been exposed to the virus early in life is an interesting but as yet unanswered question.
SteveF
It’s true that’s an unanswered question. And it may turn out that the main difference is people got the common-cold corona viruses when young, and that makes the difference.
.
But it’s still not especially relevant to my answer to MikeM. Mike asked me what evidence there was that Covid is more deadly. Boots on the ground: Lots of people of any age dying of Covid is evidence it is more virulent that a variety that isn’t killing people. Yes: this may not not be unimpeachable evidence, but it is evidence. Evidence doesn’t become “non-evidence” merely because it’s imperfect or not absolutely conclusive.
.
MikeM/SteveF,
It’s also worth nothing that the observed mutation rate of the commo corona viruses is evidently 6 mutations/year. That of influenza is 25 a year. That observedin Covid is 10 mutations a year.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325115420.htm
.
Yes, corona virus mutations are slower. But that’s even comparing 6 to 25 is not a large difference. Yeah, one mutates more slowly than the other, but these are the same order of magnitude! And other factors other than mere number of accumulations can affect whether the mutations can evade previous immunity.
.
This virus is new. I don’t see how the somewhat slower mutation should materially change my prediction which was
1) I don’t think a mutation rate that is 1/2 to 1/4 that of influenza is going to magically prevent meaningful variants to emerge.
.
2) I don’t think the slower mutation rate will eliminate the potential animal pathways for new variants.
.
3) I don’t think the somewhat slower mutation rate will prevent some of the strains from being more virulent.
.
4) I don’t think the somewhat slower mutation rate will prevent health agencies from monitoring.
.
5) I think health agencies are going to be monitoring. I can’t imagine pharmaceutical companies not developing new vaccines when new circulating strains are detected. Many of the known vulnerable will want them.
.
6) I think some people will take the new vaccines and some won’t. I think this is a rather unremarkable prediction!! I mean…I’ll take it. Perhaps Mike M won’t. that would be enough to make that prediction true!
.
7) I still think we’ll see pandemics largely eliminated. But people will still want protection against the endemic disease.
.
I should add: my prediction is for a rather modest time frame: about a decade or two. I make no predictions for a century. Big pharma may come up with vaccines that give immunity to portions of the virus that are more stable. Or people could discover certain prophylactics work. Or lots of other things. But for a decade or two I think the above is very likely to happen.
.
I have no idea why MikeM thinks the rather small difference is mutation rate translates no evidence to expect this sort of thing to happen. (And he used “no”.) And I have no idea what he thinks is going to happen. Just, evidently not what I predict.
.
Does he predict we’ll only get vaccines every 4 years? Or what? I don’t know, because he doesn’t say. Rather he gives some impression that the mutations rates are widely different (they aren’t) and that somehow there is “no” basis for me predicting this sort of outcome.
.
Yeah. My prediction might be wrong. But it’s not because the coronavirus mutation rate is much much smaller than the influenza mutation rate. They are the same order of magnitude!
lucia (Comment #208293): “Mike asked me what evidence there was that Covid is more deadly.”
.
But I did NOT ask that. I questioned whether it is more virulent. I *think* that virulence is a property of the virus. The Wuhan virus is more deadly in the elderly than in the young. I do not think that it is correct to say that it is more virulent in the elderly. Even if I am mistaken as to usage, context made my meaning pretty clear. I specifically acknowledged that the Wuhan virus has killed people at a much higher rate than the endemic coronaviruses. I asked if there is any evidence that was due to the virus being more virulent rather than the population being more susceptible.
MikeM
You are now playing word games. Being deadly is a sign of virulence.
Deadly is harmfulness that kills. So: being deadly is a sign it is more harmful– i.e. virulent.
If you want to men “virulent in a way other than that it kills you”, say so.
In any case, all the hospitalized people who managed not to die is also evidence of greater virulence.
.
We’ve always had old people. And the current old people have not been dying of great numbers of the common cold viruses: So yes. We have evidence Covid is more virulent— i.e. harmful (in the sense it killed people. )
And we also have evidence it’s more virulent in the sense it puts more people in the hospital.
.
The evidence of people who were harmed (dead or hospitalized) more by Covid than by the common-cold corona viruses is quite apparent. I’m rather amazed you are asking for it.
Omicron and its variants are going endemic. There is a 100.0000% that will happen. The number of meaningful future mutations are a factor of the number of replications happening and the genetic opportunity for immunity evasion and/or transmission improvement. Very difficult to predict. GOF might help, ha ha. A new virus likely has a lot more genetic opportunity than something old like the flu. Omicron is in replication nirvana now. I would expect covid to start running out of big jumps in genetic opportunity eventually. I thought that about delta though, ha ha.
.
It looks like humans commonly have a short term waning immunity for things like the flu and cold of around a year for infection, but also have a longer term t-cell immunity against severe outcomes.
.
The last thing I read about seasonality was that it was a combination of this waning immunity and a host of other cyclic things (weather, travel, schools, etc.) that randomly interact but have more or less sync’d up and reinforce each other to a yearly cycle and sometimes combine efficiently for big outbreaks like random wave additions. The short term immunity get refreshed more or less annually by exposure, and this exposure is a good thing. I remember when my kids were in school in FL that it was common for everyone to get (mildly) sick in Jan after all the national holiday tourists brought their new virus variants with them.
.
There is no simple causation to breakout cycles. It’s like waiting for a big wave to show up on the seashore. A big offshore storm will certainly make it happen but rogue waves still happen occasionally anyway. One thing is clear, they don’t understand it very well and can’t predict it with any skill.
Tom–
The estimate that Covid had 10mutations a year vs influenza having 25 was before Omicron. Omicron accumulated a mega-shit-ton of mutations relative to whatever ancestor they think it had and then appearend on the scene. Experts are wondering how or why in accumulated so many. But it did accumulate a lot. So any assumption that Covid must mutate at the rate of other corona virus doesn’t seem to have empirical support. And the estimate of 10 a year would likely blowaway by adding our most recent variant of concern to the analysis.
At least in the “decade term”, I think there is a good likelyhood for meaningful mutations at a rate that people will want updated vaccine the same way they want flu vaccines. We know the ‘way’ people want flu vaccines is some will want them and others won’t. But I suspect we’ll get vaccine to cover other variants within the year–whether we “need” it or not. (I’d rather it was available an unneeded rather than needed and unavaible. But I recognize there are people who seem upset at the thought pharma companies might develop something before we need it. I think Scott Adams whined on twitter.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/16/omicron-variant-mutations-covid/
So that’s 50 accumulated in about 2 years. Not looking like it’s slower mutating than influenza.
Lucia,
the rate of mutation is inflated by the many (many!) millions of infections. In the endemic phase, the rate should fall.
There is light at the end of the tunnel for Florida…. At least if you believe in calculus there is. The second derivative of both the weekly cases per capita curve and positivity curve has turned from positive negative. We are not at the peak yet, but the peak is probably not far off. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jason.salemi/viz/shared/X924JXNGC
Oh oh…We have a Russian lady who does our housekeeping. She was with us for four hours yesterday and she just sent me a message: â€I have a covid, I’m still at home. I have a daughter, a nurse, she looks after me. everything looks like the flu to me. So sorry, do a test†Looks like it may be our turn.
SteveF,
Yes. The rate of mutation/year should fall during the endemic phase. But honestly, we don’t know how low the rate will eventually fall, though it will be lower if vaccination is widespread. Otherwise, the only way to get immunity from new variants that escape previous immunity is illness. So the natural endemic level could be quite high. We are in a period where we just don’t know. (And if we get vaccinations for new variant, we will never know the natural endemic level. We’ll get the endemic level with vaccines!)
.
Anyway: if the endemic level is as high as we see for common colds, and the virulence remains high — which it could– that would certainly be enough to make pharmaceutical companies work on vaccines for new variants, the FDA to approve and some (not all) people to want to take the vaccine.
.
OTOH: If omicron ends up as mild as it’s seeming, and it give immunity to lots of variants including future ones, we’ll probably only see a few more new vaccines. But I’m suspect the need for a few new vaccines won’t be over with omicron. This probably isn’t going go vanish into nothingness in 6 months. (I think we are leaving the close the economy stage. The populace is revolting.)
Russell,
Sorry to hear that. I always worried about our cleaning lady too, ha ha. I was keeping the windows opened while she cleaned in the early days before I became a little less paranoid. Our cleaning lady also got covid a few months back, no exposure on our side. That’s a high exposure profession.
.
If you have home tests then you will want to test yourself 2-5 days after exposure, and test yourself twice if the first one comes out negative about two days after the first test. If a home test comes out positive then you are very likely infected, no need to retest. If the home test comes out negative you can go get yourself a PCR test to see if you have a undetectable (by home test) case. However these low level infections not detectable by a home test are less likely to be contagious. Good news for FL is it is very likely omicron.
SteveF (Comment #208300): “the rate of mutation is inflated by the many (many!) millions of infections. In the endemic phase, the rate should fall.”
.
Indeed. Also, the Wuhan virus is still adapting to humans, leading to a higher rate of evolution. The paper lucia cited looked at mutation in the stem of the influenza HA protein. That is well conserved compared to the head of the protein. But the head is what the immune system sees, so mutations there are what enables influenza to evade prior immunity. So it looks like there is an order of magnitude difference between the immunologically relevant parts of the two viruses.
FYI here is a good analysis of accuracy of antigen vs PCR test:
https://journals.asm.org/cms/10.1128/JCM.01107-21/asset/9b9ea0f9-15ef-479a-818b-e4018c428afd/assets/images/large/jcm.01107-21-f001.jpg
.
The graph is a little confusing to read at first, but it is a good way to show the data. It is the number of cycles to a positive for the PCR test on the X axis and the Y axis shows how many times the antigen test also showed a positive. As expected with low cycles (high virus load) the antigen tests were more reliable.
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JCM.01107-21
By this time next week, latest a week from Monday, Florida death data should show the relative virulency of omicron vs delta.
MikeM
Yes. But that’s “evolution” doesn’t mean more adaptations. Only that some are selected for.
.
Omicrons had tons of mutations in the head. So I’m assuming you are saying this to support my point that the total number is not the main thing. Covid is showing lots of mutations in immunologically relevant portion. So the observation that that’s the relevant thing is why we can’t count on Covid not mutating to evade vaccines quickly.
.
The fact is: we have observed Covid mutate dramatically in the immunologically relevant portion! That was observed in Omicron which popped up after that paper appeared.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208304)
Thank you for your concern and advice. We live in Florida and Covid tests are as scarce as Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets. Two years into this and there are no tests to be had. It’s like a third world country. The pharmacies are taking reservations…Friday is the first one available. I have one kit I purchased a while back. My son lives in Ohio and they have been distributing test kits to residents. He had stockpiled a couple for his family. We will overnight them if necessary.
Well, covid has came to my house.
.
My significant other came down with symptoms and was tested as positive. Several days later I also came down with symptoms of fever and cough. 24 hrs later, over and done. Now she is pissed at me as my reaction to covid was less than her reaction to the vaccine.
.
She is still down somewhat after 6 days now, but not having a reaction to covid requiring drastic treatment. Her biggest complaint is lack of smell. Food just doesn’t taste right without it.
That’s too bad about her symptoms. I hope she isn’t really pissed at you!!!
Ed Forbes,
I hope your wife recovers quickly.
.
Were either of you vaccinated?
My favorite subject. NYC, like many places, are hitting covid records nearly every day. The Northeast has led the surge recently. The NYT’s does an analysis. Are they not following The Science? Surely they must be immoral morons who are getting just results from electing their feckless leaders! If ever I have seen a bona fide death cult, this is it.
.
“Even as Omicron has torn through the country in the final weeks of the year, upending everything, setting case records, canceling flights, causing long lines at testing sites, threatening a smooth reopening of school in January, returning us to the devotional of the propane heat lamp, it is hard not to feel for New York an appreciation that is snobbish, imperious, unambivalent.”
“There’s a matter-of-factness and a lack of whimpering, which gets everyone throughâ€
“In the post-vaccination phase of the pandemic, this year, New York proved itself newly desirable by a crude and perhaps all too literal measure of livability, which is to say that you could be here and reasonably expect that if you were in an emergency room needing critical care, you probably would not die waiting for a bed that was slow to materialize in a hospital full of unvaccinated patients very sick with Covid. This may not constitute the sexiest reason to move somewhere, but it suggests an appealing system of shared values that amounts to a collective good.”
.
Evidence of this last point has been left to reader to find.
.
The crowing he does here about NYC’s vaccination rate (92% !) and mask wearing (ubiquitous !) is a bit ironic in that this shows the * ineffectiveness * of these measures and how this pandemic could never have been stopped even if the rest of the world had only matched the snobbishness and imperiousness of NYC residents.
I take no pleasure in pointing out the obvious that public health and our expert class were wrong about this pandemic in very important and significant ways. Much of their erroneous pronouncements were made in uncertainty so they should get a little leash, but many of these were made with an unearned air of certainty using a cloak of The Science. Tiny little voices in the corner were saying “we have never eradicated a disease like this†and they were suppressed, and still are to this day.
.
That’s not to say that doing nothing was necessarily a better answer. Waiting out covid in isolation and eventually (inevitably?) getting omicron is a better plan in hindsight for many people. Waiting for vaccines with partial lockdowns likely saved a lot of lives. So it’s a mashup of heroes (medical personnel, essential workers) and zeroes (self righteous politicians and media).
.
All in all the public health sector did not cover themselves in glory here. They did not anticipate problems such as testing and vaccination rollouts that was well within their expertise to prepare for. It was the private sector that provided and produced the most useful tool, vaccines. Like all big government bureaucracies they were sluggish and incompetent when faced with a new crisis. The real test now is whether they will learn from this.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208314): “I take no pleasure in pointing out the obvious that public health and our expert class were wrong about this pandemic in very important and significant ways.”
.
Frankly, I can’t think of anything important they got right.
Steve,
.
Ruth had the 2 shot sequence of Pfizer last March. I am unvaccinated for covid. But now I have natural antibodies for covid ðŸ‘
.
Not against vaccine in general as I have had all the normal childhood shots plus several other adult vaccines. The FDA, CDC, and WHO have lied too many times, over many years, for me to take anything they say without skepticism. I have gone from “not convinced “ to “No F***** Way !†on getting covid shots.
.
Tom Scharf,
Re NYC and Omicron. I can’t decide if that’s just spin, i.e. trying to make silk purses out of sow’s ears, or chutzpah. The classic definition of chutzpah is when a child murders his parents and asks for mercy because he’s an orphan.
Interesting article on the effectiveness of masking. I don’t think the authors really looked at the data in the table included.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloth-face-mask-omicron-11640984082
Based on that data, it’s N95 all the way. Cloth and surgical masks will only slightly delay getting infected compared to wearing nothing. The title should actually read: “Why even surgical masks are definitely not enough as Omicron spreads.” With both infected and not infected are wearing surgical masks, the time to get infected is one hour compared to 15 minutes when both are wearing nothing. Wearing a surgical mask means you will be infected if you go out in public.
They have known for a long time now that cloth masks were pretty useless. I still see tons of these things around. Yet another failure of public health to not make this clear to everyone.
You know, if Trump were still our Dear Leader, we wouldn’t be having this testing fiasco two years in.
Tom Scharf,
Short of well-fitted N95, masks are just a sorry mixture of virtue signaling, political theater, and a reason for the world’s Karens to heap social shame on the independent. Masks have nothing to do with public health.
SteveF,
Yes. Well-fitted N95 or better. Btw, the (poorly formatted) table I posted was, as indicated, from Spring 2021. You can probably divide those numbers by a factor somewhere between two and four for Omicron. That means that both infected and uninfected wearing surgical masks have possibly the same exposure time to infection as for earlier variants with no masks at all. So it’s not surprising that Omicron is spreading like a wildfire.
Even if masks worked they wouldn’t work. When I get groceries or shop at Walmart there are always people wearing masks below their noses. Earlier on some Karens would confront those people, but no one does anymore.
.
The Governor can force people to “wear” mask, but he really can’t force the populace to wear then right, not even if it’s the “right” kind of mask. And public messaging isn’t going to get people to switch to the “right” kind now! If they want to get people do do something that is at least somewhat unpleasant, they can only do so many about faces and with “now we know” messages.
.
FWIW: A larger fraction of people wear masks “right” at ballroom dance parties where they are required. Back during the ‘age of delta”, I talked to another dancer about that. We both agreed we thought they didn’t work, but also thought there was less spread at studios where people were required to mask. This was because the major “circulators” who went “everywhere” chose the non-mask studios and avoided the mask studios.
.
Major circulators would be people who are going to bars, restaurants, driving to the “big” parties at Glendora and so on. These are fun, nice people. We know who these people are; we know where they go.
.
Now mind you, at this point, all those people may have already had Covid. And Omicron spread so much, the only thing one can do to avoid it is live like a monk for the next month while everyone else gets it. Then live like a month for another month until it’s effectively gone.
lucia,
People who don’t believe in getting vaccinated likely won’t wear an effective mask either.
DeWitt,
Yep. That was another factor Dan and I considered.
As a generality, people who don’t wear masks are also anti-vax. It’s not 100%, but the people I know who are openly anti-vax (and I know some) also think masks are “ridiculous”.
.
Some of those will, nevertheless, go places that require masks– if there is something very attractive otherwise. (An anti-vaxer I know came to the showcase at the studio I patronize to watch friends show cases. She wore a mask and wore it properly. It was cloth; but still she wore it. ) But mostly they pick places that don’t require masks if they have the option.
.
Dan (the other dancer I discussed the mask issue with) said he went to “new studio X”. Once. The owners were joked about masks and made it very clear they weren’t required. So no one wore them at their party. So Dan wasn’t going to go there for the duration of the pandemic.
.
I haven’t gone there. (Though, admittedly, I have two “regular” places one of which has dance parties every weekend. I can’t be at two dance parties at the same time–so I might have never skipped the parties at the “regular” place, which I like a lot. But then new studio is nearer! But I’m not trying it out until there is less uncertainty about risk.)
lucia (Comment #208325): “Even if masks worked they wouldn’t work. When I get groceries or shop at Walmart there are always people wearing masks below their noses.”
.
I wear my mask below my nose. I would not do so if they worked, but since they don’t work I figure I might as well be comfortable.
DeWitt Payne “People who don’t believe in getting vaccinated likely won’t wear an effective mask either.”
Ah yes….but they are a dying breed, thankfully.
Russell Klier (Comment #208322): “You know, if Trump were still our Dear Leader, we wouldn’t be having this testing fiasco two years in.”
.
That is true. Trump had a plan for ramping up rapid testing to something a billion a month. But Biden scrapped it. My guess is that Trump would have arranged for large purchases of the new drugs prior to approval so as to have production going when they got approved.
.
Let’s go Brandon.
Russel,
thankfully?! Really?!
.
Sorry, but I’d prefer them not to die. With luck, Omicron is milder and fewer people die.
I agree lots of people won’t wear masks correctly regardless, but that is no excuse for public health to not effectively disseminate information on what masks are the most effective, how to wear them, and where to wear them. You can buy N95’s and KN95’s on Amazon cheaply. They are inconvenient to wear for any period longer than 15 minutes.
.
After experts declared masks of little public value they reversed course and said they were basically prophylactic. It became socially unacceptable to challenge this so now I suspect any real study is going to show they have limited value, but some value. They reduce risk, perhaps only marginally. The problem is that most everyone on Team Science also suspects this result and thus doesn’t want to look under that rock.
.
Real data on masks is nowhere to be found, it is more of a religious observance by many at this point, which is why wearing a cloth mask below your nose somehow passes the religious test. The efficacy of masks has been oversold, but that doesn’t mean they have no value. Medical personnel working covid wards every day somehow managed to not get infected. My main point is that for people who are very paranoid or susceptible it should be easy to find this information.
Lucia “Sorry, but I’d prefer them not to die.â€
Sorry but I’d prefer them not to endanger my health.
I think we can now say with confidence omicron is significantly milder. The last 2 weeks has USA infections up 204% (!) and deaths down 3%. There will no doubt be a lagging increase in deaths from the huge case counts as we go along but we are far enough globally that we would have seen delta like hospitalization and death trends by now. Still sucks, it just sucks less!
.
It’s hard to analyze the real time trends due to holiday reporting blips. It seems we are likely at least 2 weeks from a peak. One suspects/hopes the decline will be very fast as well.
.
I will now make my 4th or 5th prediction that this one is the BIG one and we can then live normally for a while after this one fades. Please ignore the fact I have been wrong about this every time so far. Eventually I will be right.
There have been quite a few studies on surgical type masks. They almost all get the same result: A modest but not statistically significant benefit. I think that it is universally agreed that cloth masks are worse.
.
At least one study looked at health care workers catching the flu (in Vietnam, IIRC) found that cloth masks were significantly worse than no mask.
.
If you want to protect yourself, follow Russell’s example and get a N95 mask with the exhaust valves.
Russell,
It would also be nice and safer for me if everyone else didn’t drive on the roads when I did. We even build alcohol serving bars on roads that only have minimal monitoring.
.
Society accepts a certain amount of shared risk and we don’t get a veto on those decisions. If the mortality rate of covid was 10% then maybe the rules would be stricter. NY has some of the strictest rules in place and has one of the worst covid records. The wished for rules also need to be shown effective.
.
Covid, especially omicron, is more powerful than the remedies by a large margin. Stay home for the next month, wear your N95’s. If you had all the policies in place you wanted, you would still need to stay home for the next month and wear N95’s.
The mask debate here is funny.
.
Proponents say all should mask up because of some unknown, but small, amount of benefit masks give in stopping the spread of virus infections.
.
The known and large amount of detrimental issues with constant mask use has been well documented.
.
If accountants were to produce a cost / benefit analysis completely ignoring one side of the cost/benefit ledger, they could be sued for cause for unprofessional conduct. No danger of this happening in the “science “ community though. Cherry picking data has a long and storied history.
MIkeM
Which is fine if you are ok with endagering others.
.
Russell
Are you still wearing a mask with exhaust valves? Because if you are, and going out in public with them, then perhaps there are others who think you deserve to die.
Tom Scharf
Yep. I think those who don’t want to get Omicron and can stay at home should stay at home for the next month or two. (Looks at Russel…..)
.
They should have stayed at home for the past month because we knew how wildly it circulates.
.
If you go out, you are taking a risk of getting it. It’s lessened with an N95– but it’s still not zero. That’s on you. If you do that and whine about others endangering you — I have no sympathy for you. I mean: you won’t give up what you want to protect yourself. I don’t think you have a right to whine that others won’t give up things for you!
.
The risk will seriously die down after the peak — and this time, it looks like the new variant is so fast spreading it’s going to be a ginormous but short peak in cases. (Likely with smallish deaths– fingers crossed!). It’s not that much time to wait.
.
We in the US all seem to be on the upswing of the peak. Some locales may have reached the peak– but I wouldn’t count on it. The amount of time to wait after the peak is roughly the time it took to go from base to peak and cases detection rates are back to “pre-Omicron” and flat. (All conditions need to be met!)
.
So if you go out in the next month or so, mask or no mask, that’s on you not others.
.
As for wishing they’d actually die because you disapprove of them: Oh. Good heavens! (Besides which, their death won’t protect you any better than their recovery. So you are just being gruesome and mean spirited.)
.
lucia (Comment #208338): “Which is fine if you are ok with endagering others.”
.
A mask with exhaust valves does not endanger others more than a cloth mask does.
.
If you are sick, stay home. A mask does not change that.
MikeM
It doesn’t protect them any more than no mask. And Russel appears to think it’s good for people who don’t protect him to die. If one thinks that sort of thing, then one ought to do things to protect others. And a mask with an exhaust valve doesn’t do that.
MikeM
Sure. But the claimed point of the masks is that staying home when sick is not enough. Assymptomatic and presymptomatic people are infectious. (Post symptomatic ones appear not to be. Though this is one of those things that are somewhat difficult to know for sure.)
CDC on influenza and before politics intervened.
.
And yes, politics has intervened with covid. As influenza and covid have similar transmission, the paper should also follow for covid.
.
“.. In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.2….â€
.
“.. In this review, we did not find evidence to support a protective effect of personal protective measures or environmental measures in reducing influenza transmission. Although these measures have mechanistic support based on our knowledge of how influenza is transmitted from person to person, randomized trials of hand hygiene and face masks have not demonstrated protectionism against laboratory-confirmed influenza, with 1 exception (18). We identified only 2 RCTs on environmental cleaning and no RCTs on cough etiquette….â€
.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
.
Lucia,
“As for wishing they’d actually die because you disapprove of them: Oh. Good heavens!”
.
Pretty sure that falls under the heading of sociopath. I OTOH don’t wish such sociopaths death from covid….. but if it happened, it would seem somehow just.
I don’t see how you guys can worry about Russel’s sociopathic tendencies when we are all so sexually frustrated that we can’t date AOC. I mean, I just can’t think about anything else right now.
Ed Forbe
What do you mean by “similar”? Air born and not fomite? Or R value? (Real question. I think they are similar in terms of the former. But Covid Δ and Covid omicron have materially different Rs– or so it seems.)
.
Masks may or may not be somewhat helpful depending on situation. And if that RR in the above is reduction, that might just be an underpowered test. Everyone is allowed to have different interpretations of what the result of an underpowered tests might mean. That includes thinking the might work, but you need a better experiment. So, based on that study, the efficacy of masks is unproven. It is not disproven.
.
I’m not really in either the “masks works” or the “mask don’t work” camp. Maybe they work somewhat if you use them right, but people don’t. ( This problem plagued studies of some methods of birth control or methods to prevent transmission of stds.)
.
I think if you, personally, want to avoid infection, and you can stay at home, you should stay at home. That’s not mask related advice.
.
Well…. cough etiquette. Well, duh. If masks don’t work, cough etiquette isn’t going to work! And teaching people cough etiquette isn’t going to help because (a) they’ve mostly been taught, (b) sometimes a person suddenly overwhelmed by coughing can’t cover their mouth quickly before they start coughing. “Teaching” won’t change this the lack of time. (c) If it’s airborne, covering your mouth with a hand or even sleeve during a cough isn’t going to block the small particles at all, and certainly won’t do better than an already in place cloth mask. The ‘best’ cough etiquette could possibly achieve is parity with a cloth mask work– that at least deals with (b).
But beyond that: are you are you going to created a randomized control group of people who do and don’t practice “cough etiquette”? You almost certainly can’t have the study anonymized. (And beyond that– it’s not the people with bad cough etiquette who are going to get sick. It’s those around them! So, how would you even study this effect? I’m not seeing how.)
.
And Randomized Control Trials on cleaning? Who is going to try to create a control group who doesn’t clean in a way you can’t tell they aren’t cleaning? (You might be able to have an RCT on using HEPA filters. )
I believe covid has a much higher airborne transmission risk than the flu. Flu was almost completely eliminated in many countries with covid precautions. The main point of masks aren’t necessarily helpful until proven is true, but there is some apples and oranges here. The data I have seen on masks tend to fall in a 10% to 25% reduction of risk type of range, but these are usually from complex models based on observational datasets that have loads of confounders.
Mark Bofill
Ok…I had to rush to google!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10361641/AOC-roasted-saying-Republicans-criticize-just-wants-date-caught-maskless.html
.
I think Ham has handed us the next “Let’s go Brandon”. Jim says next time he’s criticized, he’s say the person only said that because they are disappointed they can’t have sex with him!
BTW: I also like “Frolicking in Free Florida”. I await the advertising campaign: “Come Frolick in Free Florida”.
.
Ok… I see the actual AOC quote
Lucia,
~grins~
Yup. All Ted Cruz’s haters are just unable to resist his raw sex appeal, according to the Bee.
Mark Bofill,
The really strange thing is that I find AOC not at all attractive… and that is not due to her nutty left politics. She is just kinda strange looking, and nothing like a natural beauty; really, what is going on with her nose? Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess.
Steve,
My grandmother always urged me to marry a nice Spanish girl, and I’ve always suspected that this is the underlying reason I’ve never found Spanish and Spanish derivative girls attractive. Probably this just demonstrates and underscores my need for therapy as a creepy weirdo though.
Seriously though, I know what you mean. She’s not heinous looking, but I wouldn’t have fixated on her as a sex symbol until she made it funny to do so.
mark bofill,
With that nose, I figure she must be related to Jaba the hut. (https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwallpapercave.com%2Fwp%2Fwp3051824.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) Although in fairness to AOC, she is not as much a totalitarian as Jaba.
.
YMMV.
Steve,
Well, okay. I get it. You don’t find AOC all that.
.
Before we move on, what do you think of her boyfriend’s feet? Pretty hot?
Lucid, my post was more to highlight the CDC’s tendencies to adjust their papers due to politics. Of course, one can agree or disagree on the findings of individual papers.
.
Here is a CDC paper that does not, IMHO, pass the laugh test.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm
.
“.. Among COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults aged ≥18 years whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, the adjusted odds of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 among unvaccinated adults with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were 5.49-fold higher than the odds among fully vaccinated recipients of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine who had no previous documented infection (95% confidence interval = 2.75–10.99….â€
.
5.48 X higher for unvaccinated with prior infection???
What fantasy planet did they get their data from?
.
It is well established in many papers that previous infection is way way better than vaccination. Also, the previously infected don’t spread the virus, unlike the vaccinated. So natural infection is also preferred to vaccination.
Uhm.
No disrespect intended towards you Lucia. I’m sure you’re hot as all get out and that your husband’s feet are as spectacular as any man’s feet as well, probably more spectacular than most.
Okay… I’ll shush now.
I see that one of my posts have dropped into moderation
Ed
My apologies Lucia on “ Lucid “. Damm auto correct
mark bofill
Well…I wouldn’t have taken it that way anyway. But while I was born in El Salvador and my grandmother was born in Cuba:
1) Her maiden name was Harding. (Her father had moved to Cuba as head of the enginnering company that built the rail road connecting Havana to Santiago. The he stayed long enough that his eight daughters were all born there.)
2) After landing in the US, grandmother eloped with an Irish American. (Then took their kids back to Cuba for a while, before returning again.)
3) My mother is a British Isles stew (English, Scots, Irish.) Naturally, she moved to Latin America and lived there for quite a while (giving birth to children!) But as far as we are aware, there’s not a drop of Spanish in her!
My grandmother’s mother had one Basque parent and one from Cuba. That one claimed background from the Madrid area. So I’m really a very tiny fraction Spanish — maybe 1/16th. It’s just that not all immigrants to Latin America were Spanish! And my not-much fraction Spanish family kept going back and forth to Latin American countries!
Mark
Oh, btw: My feet are sort of short and stumpy. My husband says they are strong proleteriate feet. Made for stomping wine. I have highish insteps. My best friend in high school says that makes them “ballerina” feet (but never actually deformed by doing ballet.)
.
My dance instructor says short feet with a high instep are what “looks best” for dancing! It looks more like you are “pointing” than if you have long flat feet. Heh!
.
The judges don’t really judge you based on the size of your feet. And I think they can tell if you are actually pointing anyway.
I think AOC successfully changed the conversation. She is becoming better at politics.
Tom Scharf,
Changed it away from her ‘frolicking in Florida’? (with no mask?) Yes. She did. She is good at politics.
I have long flat feet. Not unlike clown feet when you get right down to it. Theoretically an advantage in karate point sparring (it’s not actually effective to kick somebody with the tip of a foam sparring boot. But it still wins a point!) But I’ve given that up since Covid, classes got too sporadic and I got too old and fat and inflexible and busy. I ought to find some other way and make some time to exercise.
AOC good at politics, well. Yeah, in her way. She’s usually good with social media. She can afford this fairly minor folly. I wouldn’t overindulge in such things were I in her shoes though. It’s already easy to dismiss her as young, inexperienced, air-headed, etc.
Mark,
Right now…. my feet are totally funny! In November, I had a pedicure so the toes would look good in open toed shoes. Why? I don’t know because I only competed smooth not rythmn. Smooth shoes are closed toed. (But the pedicure chairs are sooooooooooo dreamy….).
Taking the polish off is a POA. So I’ve been letting it grow out.Most of the three small toes have grown out to the point where there is no polish after trimming to keep the nails from being a POA in shoes. But the big toe is still covered 3/4 in glitterly green polish. The second toe is about 1/4th polish.
.
VERY bizarre looking. But the toes are mostly hidden under socks.
.
Honestly, does anyone think feet are a major sexy vs. unsexy feature? Other than actual deformities, I suspect not.
.
But still supposedly an arch is more stable if you are on point in ballet. (This makes some sense). And it’s also stronger “on point.) Also makes sense.
And supposedly, it can make “pointing” your toe in Latin dances look like “more” (which also makes sense). But the foot itself isn’t really better looking and certainly not”sexier”. It’ a foot!!!
~grins~
There’s all sorts out there. I’ve come to suspect that someplace, somewhere sometime there is or has been a fetish involving every aspect of human experience. Foot fetishes are (relatively) common enough to be a thing; a specific term. [Edit: In fact I read in wikipedia that it is the most common sexual fetishism.]
That mentioned and set aside, I don’t personally think feet are particularly interesting, but still. I can appreciate female beauty, and I guess feet are a part of the whole.
.
LOL. This is beginning to remind me of that time I started in on eating brains (covid zombieism) and ended up grossing myself out. [Edit: Covid vaccine zombieism, I should have said]
Always fun though, thanks Lucia.
Lucia,
” perhaps there are others who think you deserve to die.” You may get your wish. Symptoms started this AM, four days after contact, right on schedule.
Russell,
You dying in not my wish. I hope whatever you have it remains mild. Fingers crossed for you.
.
Where did you make contact with someone?
Lucia,
“Where did you make contact with someone?â€
My post from Saturday:
“Oh oh…We have a Russian lady who does our housekeeping. She was with us for four hours yesterday and she just sent me a message: â€I have a covid, I’m still at home. I have a daughter, a nurse, she looks after me. everything looks like the flu to me. So sorry, do a test†Looks like it may be our turn.â€
By the way, aren’t you concerned about corresponding with a psycho like me?
SteveF (Comment #208344)
â€Pretty sure that falls under the heading of sociopath.â€
Mike M. (Comment #208335)
“If you want to protect yourself, follow Russell’s example and get a N95 mask with the exhaust valves.â€
That is actually rated at N99 but it is the manufacturer’s own testing so I’m not sure. I started wearing that after I was double vaccinated and Florida had done away with all mask requirements. At that time I was one of the few wearing any face protection. As for protecting others… Based on the configuration of the silicone flapper and downward directed exhaust vents I think it does provide some protection to others, maybe similar to a cloth mask or one of those plastic face shields. In terms of being street legal… This is Florida, anything goes. The only time I was challenged with it was on a Cardiologist office visit. They had me wear a toilet paper mask over it.
Russell,
I’m not worried about corresponding with you.
.
I haven’t said you are a psycho. I think it’s extremely mean spirited of you to want other people to die.
.
Given your concerns and desire for self protection, If I’d known you had a housekeeper visit from time to time, I would have recommended a HEPA filter to run at least while she arrives and for a few hours after she leaves. If the weather was nice, I would have recommended opening windows, or sitting outdoors (or on a screened lanai) while she was cleaning. The HEPA or opening windows could knock out some Covid virus if she breathed any out.
.
Honestly, I’d recommend a HEPA for anyone in a building where you might share air with others. That’s many condos and apartments which often share a hallway. Air passes in and out of the hallway. In a highrise, it also can move from different floors.
.
Hope you’ll be ok.
The CDC says masks with vents do not protect others
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/mask-fit-and-filtration.html#:~:text=%E2%80%A2%20Do%20NOT%20wear%20cloth,the%20virus%20to%20escape.
By choosing a mask with vents you are electing to protect yourself only and not protect others. I assume you have chosen this type of mask for your own comfort.
.
Given you stated position that those who do not protect others should die, I find your choice of mask a bit odd and selfish. SteveF clearly thinks something even stronger about you.
.
By the way: As an engineer, I can assure you your reasoning about the “flaps” on the mask protecting others is incorrect. With regard to a mask with vent not protecting others, the CDC is correct and you are wrong.
I’m sure you are aware the CDC also doesn’t recommend these. Also: they won’t protect others or you for small respireable particles. Those just travel around the shield the same way air does. To protect others from small particles, you need to ensure that air you exhaust has to go through a filter before it gets into the atmosphere.
.
Cloth masks may or may not provide some protection to others. They likely provide some, though perhaps little. The likely provide more protection to others than to the wearer as they do trap some particles in the mask material.
.
But wearing a mask with a vent is a decision to protect yourself and not protect others.
Lucia, “Given your concerns and desire for self protection, If I’d known you had a housekeeper visit from time to time, I would have recommended a HEPA filter to run at least while she arrives and for a few hours after she leaves.”
Our house has zoned air conditions systems. The zones have individual MERV 8 filters. We [mostly] stay in separate zones when our lady is here and masks are mandatory when we are near each other. I also have two homemade HEPA MERV13 filters running in two areas. AND, if this IS Covid, bring it on. I’ve had hangovers worse than this.
lucia (Comment #208372)
“But wearing a mask with a vent is a decision to protect yourself and not protect others.â€
You are ignoring my main argument. It is in the penultimate line: “In terms of being street legal… This is Florida, anything goes.†Since I began wearing the N99 mask, masks have not been required in Florida. It is against the law to require masks in Florida. If my mask provides any protection at all to others, I am exceeding what is required.
You can’t have it both ways. You lectured me that I shouldn’t want State mandated face masks and now you are lecturing me about not wearing the kind of face masks that the State does not require.
.
Your main argument is this:
I told you it’s incorrect and explained why. It won’t provide protection to others. (You are right that it’s similar protection to “plastic face shields’ which provide no protection.)
.
Its a house and it sounds like you have filtration. Does you fan run 100% of the time? Filters only work when air blows through them. So if you want them to protect you from cleaning ladies, you need to be sure the fan is on all the time. (Our fan can be turned on to run 100% of the time.)
.
Describe these.
.
Well: you are vaccinated and boosted. And omicron may be milder. If you can, get tested.
Lucia, You don’t comprehend life in the Free State of Florida.
The State of Florida has no mask mandates. The State forbids local governments and local school boards from having mask mandates. People are free to not wear a mask. It is our choice. You yourself have lauded this concept and chided me when I wanted local mask mandates.
In Florida, you are also free to wear a mask for your own protection. I choose to wear the very best mask I can. It is rated at N99+ by the manufacturer. [I have my doubts about 99+ because it is not independently tested.] The high filter pressure drop requires exhaust valves to facilitate exhalation. Whether my mask protects others is of no concern to the State [or you!]. Let Freedom Ring!
Russell,
I don’t need to comprehend live in the Free State of Florida to know:
1) Your mask with vents does not protect others.
2) You chose to wear it.
3) You say you wish for those who don’t protect you to die.
That means you chose to not protect others, but want those who won’t protect you to die. That’s a bizarred and uncharitable double standard.
This is nothing to do with the law in Florida. It has nothing to do with my concern or that of the state. You simply have a double standard.
lucia (Comment #208375) “I also have two homemade HEPA MERV13 filters running in two areas.
Describe these.â€
Here is mine and test results….
Dr. Jeffrey E. Terrell, director of the Michigan Sinus Center, University of Michigan, demonstrates how to build an air purifier with a HEPA filter for about $25 with parts from your local hardware store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU
I’d seen those before. My main concern about those relative to store bought was they would probably be noisy. Are they?
Biden has problems, recent poll:
“The economy was the top priority for men and women, every age cohort, Latino and white voters, and those with and without college educations. Black respondents, who named racism their chief priority, said the economy takes second place.”
“Some 72% disapprove of his handling of the price of everyday goods, while 66% disapprove of his efforts to help their wallets.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/disapproval-of-biden-hits-new-high-11641334239
.
54% disapprove / 42% approve.
.
I don’t necessarily think the President has a lot of control over the economy especially with globalism and covid. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a big problem for the President politically. BBB is pretty much dead with those numbers. I don’t think anyone is buying the lame claim that BBB will help inflation.
lucia (Comment #208379)
“My main concern about those relative to store bought was they would probably be noisy. Are they?â€
Yes they are as loud as a box fan. I don’t know how the noise level compares to a $600 HEPA filter. I have them on smart plugs. Alexa turns them on at midnight and off at 6AM. When needed you can also control them by voice from any room. They make much less noise than the housekeeper’s vacuum, so I run them when she is here. Also those MERV 8 filters in the AC ducts are silent and I can turn them on by voice from any room. MERV 8 is only efficient at removing particles of 3 microns and larger [which helps a lot with my asthma] but for covid they recommend MERV 13, like I have on the box fans.
Russell,
If I had a housekeeper come once a week, I probably would have built one of those. I could keep one in the basement and one upstairs.
Lucia, They remove a tremendous amount of stuff from the air. [More than the AC filters.] They look gross so I replace them every few months.
Russell,
I’m sure they do remove a tremendous amount of stuff! They probably even reduce the rate at which you need to dust.
.
I mostly not so worried about “stuff” in the air; I don’t have allergies. But if more people lived in this house, or I had hired help coming regularly, I’d want to remove Covid virus to keep the ambient level lower. As it is, on the rare occasions when any worker or sales person comes to the house, we try to meet outdoor on the patio or I open the windows and run the kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans to encourage air to come in through the house windows. I haven’t had any sales personel or workers in the house during winter. Only a HEPA filter would work for that.
.
Within the past week I have seen six individual reports [unconfirmed and unscientific] of people in the US having covid lasting one day or less. My son said it is the abridged variant.
>Within the past week I have seen six individual reports [unconfirmed and unscientific] of people in the US having covid lasting one day or less. My son said it is the abridged variant.
The issue is isolating whether this is due to the variant or the change in the population. That is is the variant actually less virulent or is acquired partial immunity, by previous infection of similar strains and/or vax, making the cases milder in those people catching it.
Andrew P (Comment #208386): “The issue is isolating whether this is due to the variant or the change in the population.”
.
My impression is that the reduction in virulence is everywhere simultaneous with the arrival of omicron. If so, that shows that it is the change in the virus that is responsible. But it is not like I have actually researched the question.
Mike M,
The evidence is now almost overwhelming that omicron is far less virulent than the concurrent delta variant in many places.
.
The only doubt is exactly how much less virulent. As I have said before, Florida is the perfect test case…. delta had pretty much died out (20-odd deaths per day in a population of 22 million) before the arrival of omicron. Case numbers in Florida have set all-time records with omicron, but deaths have (so far) not moved. We will have a very good read on virulence of omicron within a week or so.
.
And maybe a week or two after that the Biden administration will back off all the crazy covid mandates and ‘initiatives’…. no, I’m only joking. With the crazy dems, it’s all covid all the time.
The risk of having contact with one person for 4 hours is a lot different than having contact with 16 different people for 15 minutes each. You have to balance risk and at some point you have to pretty much give up and accept covid as an endemic risk in your life. That doesn’t mean unnecessary risk, but how much of your life are you willing to give up waiting on a pandemic that shows no signs of going away?
Somebody out there must really care about Jan 6th, the leftish media acts like this is still an ongoing “investigation” bound to turn up vast conspiracies. I have seen nothing new on this in 9 months. Just another example of selection bias in the media on what gets completely over the top coverage even when nothing new is happening. A repeat of Trump Russia collusion.
An update on my “This is no worse than a hangover” position, just another anecdote….. My son’s boss was suddenly stricken today. They were talking on the phone and he was having trouble communicating because he couldn’t breathe. I sent my son the CDC guidelines about when to get immediate emergency medical help [It said Now!]. That is all we know. My son has been unable to reach him since he sent him the CDC info. The boss was in Myrtle Beach and is in his 50s.
CDC Guideline:
When to seek emergency medical attention
Look for emergency warning signs* for COVID-19. If someone is showing any of these signs, seek emergency medical care immediately:
Trouble breathing
Persistent pain or pressure in the chest
New confusion
Inability to wake or stay awake
Pale, gray, or blue-colored skin, lips, or nail beds, depending on skin tone
*This list is not all possible symptoms. Please call your medical provider for any other symptoms that are severe or concerning to you.
Call 911 or call ahead to your local emergency facility: Notify the operator that you are seeking care for someone who has or may have COVID-19.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/steps-when-sick.html
Tom Scharf (Comment #208390)
Somebody out there must really care about Jan 6th, the leftish media acts like this is still an ongoing “investigation†bound to turn up vast conspiracies.
–
Biden to talk today on the horrible uprising and a lot of Democrat activity directed to getting rid of Trump and Trump supporting members before the Mid terms.
They may be able to pull it off but at what cost?
–
People hate injustice and the more likely outcome is a swing back to a populist Republican team. Trump or not. reminiscent of Germany in the 1930’s where a failed peoples revolt turned a Country a few years later.
angech,
By ‘Trump supporting members’ I assume you mean members of Congress. There is no possible way that anyone will ‘get rid’ of members of Congress. If Trump is ‘charged’ yet again with ‘insurrection’ more than a year out of office, then the Dems will for sure lose both houses of Congress in November instead of just one. I think you have been reading too much of the hype from the MSM in the USA (and aligned leftist media outside the USA).
I suppose angech is referring to this:
.
Garland Says Jan. 6 Instigators Could Face Prosecution Along With Pro-Trump Rioters
Attorney general says Capitol attack’s perpetrators at any level will be held accountable
https://www.wsj.com/articles/garland-says-jan-6-instigators-could-face-prosecution-along-with-rioters-11641417686
.
This is just bluster IMO. Trying to do this in a politically neutral way that doesn’t also sweep up the Portland protesters and some of the BLM protesters is not obtainable under our constitution. This kind of politically motivated prosecution is why we strive to have a separate but equal judiciary. This is almost entirely a political exercise at this point.
.
I say prosecute the capital mob, but the same standards must apply to all political protests. If you think the capital protests are different in some way, then charge people with different crimes and see if you can prove it and make it stick. You can charge people with “insurrection” I think.
.
In the “you really can’t make this stuff up” category, the NYT shamelessly runs this story today:
Manhattan D.A. Acts on Vow to Seek Incarceration Only for Worst Crimes
Alvin Bragg has told prosecutors in his office to seek jail or prison time for only the most serious offenses, unless the law requires otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/nyregion/alvin-bragg-manhattan-da.html
.
Mr. Cynic assumes “most serious” is code for crimes committed by their out group. There has always been prosecutorial discretion, but it’s getting out of hand with blanket refusals to prosecute aimed directly at identity groups. I think I’ll pass on moving to NY any time soon.
Another item for the “you can’t make this up” file. Rhode Island fired a bunch of unvaccinated hospital employees. Now, because of staffing shortages, they are allowing COVID-positive staff to report for work. But the unvaccinated are still persona non grata.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/unvaccinated-nurses-fired-covid-health-care-workers
Tom Scharf,
I vaguely remember seeing some polls where a substantial fraction of people thought that anyone who voted for Trump in 2020 should lose their job and generally be separated from ‘polite’ society. Trying to unseat current Republican Congresspersons is of a piece with that. Does no one on the left remember Joe McCarthy or the House Unamerican Activities Committee?
Jan 6’th is mostly just distraction in my view. Every minute politicians and media can spend on that is one less minute they have to cover bad news for which the blame might be laid at President Biden’s door; inflation, the border situation, rising crime, omicron, BBB failure, etc.
I get a laugh every time I see one of those we are heading toward a “civil war” trope articles. I don’t read these things but I wonder exactly who these progressive media people think are going to lay down their lives for their cause? What is the cause exactly? Saving democracy in some hand wavy way? I still don’t understand this at all. I think we can be pretty sure all the people writing these screeds aren’t actually thinking about fighting in this “war” themselves, they wouldn’t even associate with people who own guns, ha ha.
In actual news, the SC will hold a hearing on vaccine mandates tomorrow. That might actually be worth listening to.
Surely Jan 6 hearings etc have just one primary aim – remove Trump from contention for 2024?
Civil war? Are there enough people that can’t abide the idea of government from that they would prefer succession? That could get messy but seems extremely unlikely although Texas and California seem to have debated the idea. As to what issue worth risking your life and lifestyle? From the outside, that seems pretty hard to fathom.
They just want to tarnish any politician with Jan 6th in any way they can, they don’t really care much about the actual mob anymore. I think Trump lost enough support from that insanity to prevent him from being a factor in 2024. It can be a bit counterproductive to overplay those cards though if you are a Democrat. There is a subset of people who will vote for Trump just because it causes maximum annoyance among the left, ha ha.
.
The civil war talk is just not serious, but VSP (very serious people) like to talk about it … very seriously. I think it is more about forcing their correct and righteous political will upon others, not seceding. They don’t want the red states to secede, they want them to OBEY the commands of their betters. It’s all so silly. “Democracy” is apparently defined as the left winning elections. They can’t even fathom that Trump could win another fair election and they would just need to live with that, kind of like what happened in 2016, which they never accepted.
.
Anyhow I maintain that the VSP will surrender within 10 minutes once Twitter has been cutoff and Starbucks runs out of coffee due to a blockade.
Phil,
No. Or if that’s someone’s aim, the hearings aren’t well designed to achieve that goal. There is nothing in them that would result in him being unable to run.
.
I doubt the hearings are going to change anyone’s mind about anything much.
I suspect the hearings are mostly designed to fire up the people who voted not for Biden but against Trump. The problem with that strategy is now Biden has been in office for a year it is obvious his administration’s policies have been a disaster for the country. For persuadable voters (probably not more than 10%) maybe mean tweets by an insufferable pompous buffoon are not as bad as stupid and destructive policies. The hearings are just “never, ever, ever vote for Trump!” repeated a million times over every MSM outlet.
.
I don’t know if Trump could win in 2024; he continues to have very high negatives, and there is nobody who could run in 2024 who would bring voters to the polls like Trump… both for and against. I hope Trump does not run in 2024, since someone like DeSantis or Abbott ought to win easily, while Trump winning would be at best a coin flip; then there is the factor that he is a puffed-up, offensive a$$hole, and everyone would have to listen to his pronouncements for 4 years. I *really* hope he doesn’t run.
Aromatherapy for Covid in the lungs… asking for a friend.
These look promising, from Pakistan and India but I don’t know anything about the authors or their research facilities. We have used a concoction of oils, eucalyptus, tea tree and peppermint for sinus congestion for a number of years. My wife swears by it.
“COVID-19 and therapy with essential oils having antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and immunomodulatory propertiesâ€
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7427755/
“Essential oils as an effective alternative for the treatment of COVID-19: Molecular interaction analysis of protease (Mpro) with pharmacokinetics and toxicological propertiesâ€
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7874929/
The hearings serve the same purpose as the russiagate “investigation”: use the force of the law to dig for dirt on your political opponents while leaking a stream of lies to the media. Those lies will still be repeated, and embellished upon, long after the truth has passed out of general circulation.
Russell,
As with all proposed treatments, we await phase III testing. That seems rather far off.
.
It might turn out it works. Or not. If your wife has loved smelling these aromas for years, I don’t see any reason to stop smelling the nice aromas.
Russel,
By the way, I see the oils include one from Vicks Vapo rub:
Lucia, “ I see the oils include one from Vicks Vapo rub†Yes, this stuff actually smells medicinal, not perky. Incidentally, my doctor started treatment for a lung infection before my test came back, steroids and albuterol. She said I would get the same regimen with or without a Covid test.
I have a question for the denizens of Chicagoland. Is anyone seriously discussing firing the Chicago teachers who refuse to show up for work? That is surely a fireable offense, union or not.
Russel. That sound about right. You aren’t getting a fancy virus specific treatment
SC arguments on vaccine mandates appear to be splitting along partisan lines, but it looks like a close call either way. The liberals are using the usual argument of a problem exists therefore we must do something regardless of the law (pound the table), conservatives are arguing the law and limitations of authority given to agencies.
.
Justice Sotomayor is telling Keller that the OSHA vaccine requirement is not a mandate, because of the testing option. (Hmmm … not very convincing … more clever lawyering).
.
Prelogar says that there are some adverse (vaccine) consequences, but minimal compared to COVID-19.
Alito asks if OSHA has ever imposed any other regulation that would impose potential adverse health effects on workers. Prelogar says it has not, but there is no reason to think the regulation is precluded on that ground.
.
Justice Barrett asks the government how long OSHA intends to use the powers it has to bypass the notice-and-comment period of regulation, given that COVID-19 is now on its way to becoming endemic, and may last for years if not longer.
“When must OSHA resort to its normal authority and notice and comment?” she asks.
The government lawyer says that is not clear but assures the court that this is “not a way to bypass notice and comment permanently.”
(Unsurprising that the government giving up emergency power is not even on their radar).
LOL. The government can make you do whatever it wants, and it’s not a mandate, provided the government not-a-mandate gives you the opt out alternative of somebody poking your brains out through your nose once a week.
Nice.
Funny in a lot of different ways, from NBC:
“Ohio solicitor general makes anti-vax mandate case to Supreme Court remotely after getting Covid
The justices are meeting Friday to hear arguments on two of the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates.”
.
First of all it is somewhat humorous that the guy arguing against vaccine mandates got covid and had to argue remotely.
.
Secondly (shockingly not in the headline!) the guy was vaccinated and boosted and got covid anyway.
.
Thirdly the (no doubt intentional) conflating of “anti-vax” with anti vaccine mandate is misleading to say the least. Anti-vax is now a pejorative in polite company.
Seems to me there are 3 solid votes against the mandates: Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. There is one almost certain vote against the mandates: Gorsuch; he hates expansive reading statutes by agencies (Chevron deference) that amounts to agencies promulgating new law unrelated to Congressional intent.
.
Mealy-mouth Roberts, as usual, almost certainly votes with the three ‘progressives’ to allow any and all Federal intrusion into any and everything, state, local, and personal, now and forever.
.
The question is if Barrette can bring herself to block the mandates. I am not liking what I heard during questioning. The arguments offered by the government lawyers were IMO, the purest of garbage, but seemed to get little push back. This is not a good sign.
As an update it looks like vaccinations are holding up well against hospitalization and severe disease with omicron. Vaccine plus a booster shot are 88 percent less likely to be hospitalized in the UK, 65% with two doses. Confirmations from multiple other places with similar numbers. Protection against infection is, shall we say, “less effective”.
The New York Times reported this week that at two major New York hospitals, around 50 to 65 percent of “covid hospitalizations†were people coming to the hospital for other reasons and then, once there, testing positive for covid.
.
This is still a pretty big drop from 95% protection against infection with two doses, but still good enough to want to get it.
Curious that the rock solid “do no harm” ethos for medical testing disallows challenge testing but is OK with vaccine mandates that impose small risks to patients. In one a cost/benefit analysis is warranted, but in the other it is precluded on ethical grounds.
Tom Scharf,
Speaking of medical ethics, do you remember early on in NYC there was at least one hospital putting COVID patients on respirators whether it was medically necessary for the patient to protect the staff from infection? Needless to say, that hospital had a much better ventilator survival rate.
Truer words were never written….. WSJ “Frustrated They Can’t Get Covid-19 Tests, Americans Go About Their Lives†And I foresaw this…. “People who do manage to find at-home rapid tests rarely report results, leaving public-health officials without the full picture of the virus’s spread†It makes it impossible to compare the current case number curve to past case number curves. https://www.wsj.com/articles/unable-to-get-covid-19-tests-americans-carry-on-go-to-work-get-on-flights-11641551403
Russel, We can still compare death rates. 🙂
lucia (Comment #208420): “We can still compare death rates.”
.
But that includes death “with” covid, which seems to be 20-25% of covid deaths. With a much lower death rate from omicron, that fraction will likely go way up, possibly to 60-70%.
Tom,
“Democracy†is apparently defined as the left winning elections.
Could you enlarge on that? Grumping by democrats about elections seem to be when results do not match the popular vote as far as I am aware. Are there proposals by the Dems to have minority power?
What would be reaction by Red States to say “Cascadia” seceding (not that I think it has remote any chance of being seriously considered)? Joy at getting rid of so many Dems or a catalyst to civil war? I ask because I have heard Dems express delight at the idea of Texas seceding as goodbye to all those rednecks. I havent read “VSP” on civil war but sentiments like this are surely a worry.
Mike M.
“But that includes death “with†covid, which seems to be 20-25% of covid deaths. With a much lower death rate from omicron, that fraction will likely go way up, possibly to 60-70%.”
Mike, what is the source of these figures? Doesnt seem to tally with UK numbers. Excess mortality remains a pretty good measure of overall effect of Covid in my opinion.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208423): “what is the source of these figures?”
.
Multiple studies that have actually looked carefully at death certificates.
.
I don’t know anything about the UK numbers or why they might be relevant to US numbers.
Yikes. According to Worldometers, Australia just reported almost 100K cases. Population about 26M. I think that’s higher per capita than CA, TX or FL ever reported for one day. Close to NY per capita right now.
John M (Comment #208425): Todays Covid case reports in Australia include about 25,000 old previously unreported cases so check tomorrows numbers. BTW most Australian states/territories haven’t included Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs), this is the first day for one state and they are including a weeks worth, also the criteria for getting tested has changed a lot in the last couple of weeks, previously you needed a clear PCR to travel to some states, now only WA, and if you were a casual contact (like being in the same store), and some work places required weekly PCR. Now only symptomatic or close contacts (like household members) need a PCR the rest will use a RAT but only Victoria is reporting RATs the other states will in the next week so the numbers are all over the place.
Lucia,
“We can still compare death rates.“
Yes that may be true. But my interest through this pandemic has been to predict what is going to happen. I developed an interest in finding data sources for what I call leading indicators. The source and data can be sketchy because I don’t use the actual values. I only look at the rate of change and where possible the rate of change of the rate of change. I have been spot on in my predictions. Studies with high accuracy and precision on Covid are not useful because they come too late to make any meaningful decisions about how to proceed. Good death numbers will be valuable to Covid historians, but are of no use to me.
I know you love analogies….. Analyzing case curves is like looking out the windshield of a speeding car to avoid the mayhem. Looking at deaths is like observing the carnage out the back window after it happened. [Sorry!]
Russell
Well, rises in cases are still somewhat of a leading indicator for deaths. The big break in the indicator is more likely that Omicron is less virulent and/or people have some resistance so their cases are lighter. If the “problem” was cases not being reported because of home tests, we’d see deaths soaring with cases low. That’s not happening.
Reinfection and break-through rates seem to be much higher with Omicron, so many cases with existing antibodies. I think this masks virulence when just looking at raw case numbers. However, the UK study putting it at 20-30% lower plus physical reasons (not hitting lungs so hard) are definitely good. I am with WHO though saying it would be dangerous to underestimate it. It is not a common cold.
Phil Scadden,
You are right in part about the left’s grumbling: They want 50%+1 to have pretty much absolute power over 50%-1. So they object to the Senate filibuster rules, the existence of the Senate itself, the electoral college for presidential elections, etc. For many, these things make the existing system completely illegitimate.
.
Which brings us to the real issue: Much of the left does not want to ‘play by the rules’. Existing laws are ignored when not agreed with. Many judges work to undermine rather than enforce the plain words of the constitution. The constitution has the means to be amended, but the left rejects those means, once again because the means to change the constitution are not 50%+1, and so ‘illegitimate’. Many if not most of the efforts by the left are ‘by-any-means’, and not within the existing structure of laws and constitution. During my lifetime the left has grown ever more intolerant of our system of government, and seems to me to be now in large measure willfully subversive. They are not looking for reformation, they are looking for revolution.
.
And therein lies most of the political divide in the USA.
Phil
Oh. I agree. Anyway, I don’t think we can fully know how virulent any new variant is until it’s been in the wild at least 6 months. Initially, we can’t identify variants in patients because Doctors don’t have tests to distinguish. So we don’t have data because we don’t know who had which variant. It’s hard to tease out of collective data. And the history of the population exposure and vaccination matters. So the data are “dirty” and the math to tease anything out very difficult.
.
Rigth now, the situation suggests Omicron is less virulent, and as you note: doesn’t seem to invade the lings as much. But we don’t know for sure.
Lucia,
Yes, omicron could turn out worse than current data suggests. We will know more within a couple of months (heck, in Florida, within a couple of weeks!), but I’ll go with the best information available: omicron looks far, far less virulent than earlier strains (my SWAG- a factor of 5 or more). I am really not worried about it. YMMV
It is a FACT that omicron is less virulent; at least if we use lucia’s definition of virulence. If we use the definition that I used above (that virulence is a property of the virus), the situation is muddier. But the evidence still seems pretty strong.
.
Omicron has produced a low rate of hospitalization and death in South Africa in spite of that country having a low vaccination rate. I don’t see how that could be so if the virus were not less dangerous to the immunologically naive.
.
But omicron seems to be largely an epidemic of the vaxed; it seems that the vaccinated are *more* likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. That makes sense if (1) the virus has evolved to evade the very narrow immune response produced by the vaccine, (2) it is not so good at evading the much broader response from natural immunity, and (3) the unvaxed are much more likely to have natural immunity. Each of those three conditions are not only plausible, they are expected.
.
All the evidence is that omicron is much more an infection of the upper respiratory tract than earlier variants. That is optimal for spreading and quite likely optimal for evading the vaccine. And it produces an infection that is less likely to be serious.
MikeM,
My definition? Of Virulence? The dictionary definition of virulence is how much harm it causes. I think you are jumbling up what I’ve said about (a) what is virulence (quoting from the dictonary), (b) what evidence is and (c) failing to distinguish between a known fact and a mere fact.
.
Of course whether it’s more or less virulent is a “fact”. The issue is what do we know and with what degree of confidence.
.
The definition of virulence doesn’t make Omicron “less virulent” per se a known fact.
.
We have evidence it is less virulent, and likely per se.
In fact, we have pretty good evidence– it’s harming people less in the field. There is some evidence in vitro to suggest it doesn’t attack lung cells and that’s supported by what we are seeing in the field.
.
But that’s not enough to make lower virulence a “known fact”. It may turn out there is counter evidence. It may be that it’s hitting a more protected population yada, yada.
.
I think it is going to turn out that Omicron is confirmed less virulent per se than Δ. I think the probability we are going to find that is very high. But maybe it will turn out it’s not. Whatever the reason for the lower , the current level of harm to the population is less.
.
But is it;s lower virulens a “known fact”? I don’t think so. I’m wouldn’t willignly walk into a room known to be filled with infectious people unmasked feeling confident this is “less virulent” and certainly not sufficiently less virulent to do that.
.
I’m also not cloistering myself. That said: We didn’t go to the group dance yesterday evening. We kinda want to wait for the “pulse” before being in rooms of 40 people breathing heavily and dancing.
lucia (Comment #208434): “The dictionary definition of virulence is how much harm it causes … In fact, we have pretty good evidence– it’s harming people less in the field.”
.
There is no question that omicron is causing less harm. So by the definition you prefer, it is clearly less virulent.
.
That is not the only definition of virulence. There are a bunch here: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/virulence
Some agree well with your preferred definition. But there are also these:
“The capacity of any infective organism to cause disease and to injure or kill a susceptible host.”
“The collective properties of an organism that render it pathogenic to another one, the host.”
Those indicate that virulence is a property of the pathogen that determine how dangerous it is to a host who has not developed resistance.
.
Using such definitions, it is less clear if omicron is less virulent since it could be that less damage is due to changes in the hosts. But it still seems highly likely that omicron is significantly less virulent, even using those definitions.
“Are there proposals by the Dems to have minority power?”
.
You only need to check their messaging when they are a minority, ha ha. Take the Supreme Court for example, they seriously consider term limits, court packing, go to the extreme to prevent Kavanaugh from taking his seat, etc. They support “minority rights” with racial preferences constantly. They support adding DC and Puerto Rico as states to change the balance of power, which miraculously would vote blue in their estimation. There are endless examples of situational ethics here, both sides, and it is called politics. This is about power, not actual ethics. This much should be clear to everyone by now.
.
It’s impossible to not be cynical after you watch political party messaging for decades. The Democrats are fine with our system when it works in their favor. The rules of governance and elections are long established, nobody is stopping the Democrats from winning rural states in the Senate except * their own chosen policies and messaging *.
WSJ today:
“A case of Omicron compared to a case of Delta in a comparable person, comparable vaccination status, comparable age and risk factors is on the order of 60% or 70% less severeâ€
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-omicron-studies-help-explain-why-the-variant-is-mild-but-spreads-fast-11641637803
.
Testing in lab animals shows the disease is less likely to attack the lungs. All signs point to less virulence, and we also have a population with increasing immunity. There is some of both here is the latest thinking.
MikeM
I think it is less virulent. I’ve said we have evidence it is way back!
However, you that doesn’t follow from the definition I quoted. The definition I quoted merely says virulence means deadly or harmful.
.
You had challenged me to find “any evidence” delta was more virulent. I said more people died. Back then, you were seeming to claim more people dying was not evidence of virulence. Killing more people is evidence of greater virulence — as shown by any definition. There can be counter-evidence. But the need for counter evidence merely underlines that the greater number of deaths is evidence!
.
Sorry, but the other definitions you quote do not contradict mine. Mine isn’t attempting to explain what might be “more” or “less” virulent. And of course something that is virulent can only kill a “susceptible” host. We discussed that– and I said it– earlier in the thread.That one definition doesn’t explicitly call this out doesn’t mean it’s disagreeing with one that does! My definition doesn’t say “even if they are not susceptible”. That’s what we would need to make the definition I happened to quote be contradicted by yours.
The chances of catching omicron if you attend a bunch of crowded indoor events is somewhere near 100% in my estimation. Once it is in your home, everyone vulnerable will likely catch it. The long term chances of catching omicron or one of its variants is basically 100% over the next couple years. The next ten years? The only remaining question is closer to “when are you going to give up and live your life again?â€. This is more of an emotional decision than an intellectual one. I still take precautions but my intellectual side says it is futile to wait this thing out. The primitive side of my brain still tells me to run for the hills.
.
A huge number of people in the US likely already caught omicron and didn’t notice. It’s over, covid clearly beat “science†and it wasn’t close. We limited the losses somewhat, but humanity obviously doesn’t have the ability to put down a pandemic yet.
Tom:
Agreed on all points.
(1) The evidence from human population statistics, animal studies and in vitro supports that Omicron is less virulent both per se and in situ. Could that be overturned? Sure. I don’t think it will. Evidence it is less virulent regardless of choice of adjective appears to be mounting.
.
(2) Omicron is so transmissible chances are everyone is going to be exposed and if not fully protected immunity conferred by vaccine or past infection, they are going to catch Omicron. As it appears harm may only be mitigated by vaccine or infection by other variants, nearly everyone is going to get it. The question is when and how much harm they will experience. (Nothing wrong with trying to wait to get it when hospitals aren’t packed. But it’s unlikely anyone is going to escape Omicron fully. We aren’t going to have an omicron specific vaccine in time to make escape likely.)
Today’s eye rolling analysis from the NYT:
.
How Biden and Boris Johnson Reached the Same Place on Virus Policy
Two different leaders with differing approaches landed on a policy of coexisting with the virus. Analysts say they had little choice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/world/europe/biden-boris-johnson-coronavirus-omicron.html
“For Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden, analysts said, the politics and science of Covid have nudged them toward a policy of trying to live with the virus rather than putting their countries back on war footing.”
“A Conservative prime minister trying to deal in a responsible way with Covid is very different than a Democratic president trying to deal responsibly with Covid,†said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster in Washington. And yet, he said, their options are no longer all that different.”
.
The better comparison is DeSantis, but there is no way that was ever going to make it to print, ha ha.
.
The right answer was ultimately the conservative one all along. How do we write that one up and save some face? There was uncertainty along the way, so they should be given some slack, but their approach wrapped in a cloak of “science” was given on high like the ten commandments, with self righteousness, moral indignity, and certainty that have not aged well.
Small study.
https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising-immunity-against-delta/
.
After Omicron infection:
14.4x antibody response against Omicron
4.4x antibody response against Delta.
.
Some cross variant immunity, not sure how this pans out in real life.
Tom
Yep, they’ve been nudged toward DeSantis’s policy.
Both FL and NY showing early signs of approaching a peak at ~20X last month’s rate. Good news for everyone.
“Both FL and NY showing early signs of approaching a peak at ~20X last month’s rate. Good news for everyone.”
.
The difference is that in Florida life remains pretty much normal, omicron or not. Not so in NY….. covid madness and the destructive associated (and indeed mad) policies continue, with no sign of ending.
>death “with†covid, which seems to be 20-25% of covid deaths.
I estimated previously that it can’t be more than 10%, and someone else on here came up with a similar number.
Basically the number of people who die with covid is limited by the proportion that is infected at any one time.
MikeN
Or, if it’s larger than that number, that suggests Covid did contribute to their death!
Mike M. I think your prayers may be answered… I just came across this: “Below is data that shows how many hospitalized individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 were admitted for COVID-19/COVID-19 complications and how many were admitted for non-COVID-19 conditions:†NY is publishing it here [about half way down] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-states-progress-combating-covid-19-131
MikeN (Comment #208446): “I estimated previously that it can’t be more than 10%.”
.
OK, so on one hand you have your made up number and on the other we have actual data. Which is more likely to be correct?
Mike M.
I don’t think you gave any data on actual deaths “with covid”. You wrote
Perhaps there is data somewhere. But you haven’t cited them. In fact, you specifically did not cite any in response to a request you give a source!
I posted “January 1st, 2022 at 2:04 pm
There is light at the end of the tunnel for Florida…. At least if you believe in calculus there is. The second derivative of both the weekly cases per capita curve and positivity curve has turned from positive to negative. We are not at the peak yet, but the peak is probably not far off.â€
Well the good news continued this week. The second derivative of both curves continued negative and the first derivative is approaching zero for all age groups. I predict both the number of cases and percent positivity will trend downward next week. https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/
oops….. more direct link https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jason.salemi/viz/shared/X924JXNGC
“But both are true
1. Link between cases & hospitalizations is much weaker with Omicron than in the past
2. Our healthcare system is in trouble
I remain very worried about our hospitals’ ability to care for everyone who needs care over next 6 weeksâ€
This is a math workup presented by a practicing MD… I think his numbers add up unless there is a dramatic reversal in the case trend. I think the tide will turn soon in Florida, but I haven’t examined the rest of the country.
https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1479891082653552640
lucia (Comment #208450): “Perhaps there is data somewhere. But you haven’t cited them.”
.
So what? Why should I be expected to cite everything? This is not an academic journal. I do not obsessively bookmark and index everything I read. But I read pretty widely, I pay attention, and I learn.
.
You are either engaging in a cheap debating trick or, in effect, accusing me of lying.
Russell Klier (Comment #208452): ” Our healthcare system is in trouble”.
.
Indeed it is; in particular hospitals are highly stressed. The number one reason seems to be large numbers of patients due to deferred care as a result of lockdowns and terrorizing of the population. Another significant stress is staff shortages, largely as a result of vaccine mandates. The current number of people in hospital for viral respiratory infections is probably no worse than a typical flu season, surely not as much as a bad flu season.
Mike M. your entire comment #208454 is childish drivel.
Do you have backup for any of this or did you just pull facts out of thin air [again]? Nothing in all the data the MD presented in my post (Comment #208452) supports your statements.
MikeM
The “so what?” is you then respond to someone with this
As far as I can tell the “we” (i.e. you) in that situation do not have any actual data. Sure. You claim you do. I doubt you do.
And I doubt Phil (who asked you for a source) thinks you have anything much. And I doubt if MikeN thinks you have anything much.
And if you do have something that satisifies you, I suspect it’s not really useful, valid, solid data. But of course, maybe I’m wrong. The way to convince me is to cite something more than zero.
.
So sure, you don’t need to cite “everything”. And you are even free to cite absolutely nothing to support your claim of having data.
.
But if you cite zero data, no one needs to believe you have any at all. Or they can suspect that if you have “something” it might be just crud. And they can point out that you have cited nothing to support your point.
.
As far as I can tell MikeN’s estimate is better founded than your totally unsourced claim pointing to zero data.
For the record, a “MD†may or may not be very good at statistics. This is not really part of their formal training as opposed to more math heavy majors. My experience has also been that most MD’s are shockingly bad at IT which explains a lot with our current medical system. Unless they are for example research virologists then their opinion on virus trends are no better or worse than many others.
.
Narrow expertise (which is what most people have now) does not confer general expertise on related and unrelated subjects. This has become an ongoing issue with the collapse of credibility of experts. Most of this collapse is earned in my opinion, some is not. Too many, especially in the media, wrap themselves in their credentials and opine on subjects driven by their own partisanship or the partisanship of the media.
.
You get around this problem by (1) showing your work and (2) having a successful track record. I would say the most significant problem we have is the failure on (2) for “correct†opinions that don’t pan out. They still run to Ehrlich for doomsaying as an example.
.
A very smart, experienced, and unbiased person should be able to come to better conclusions than the general public if they put in the work, but I would hesitate to grant them that authority based solely on credentials.
.
Studies on experts has shown their ability to predict the future is no better than most, and worse in many circumstances. A new thing is “prediction markets†where people actually wager real money on specific outcomes. This will tend to be more reliable but has its own issues.
.
For example while academia is busy getting rid of all investments in fossil fuels based on perceived virtue, the actual markets value them much more accurately. Who has more PhD’s here? Group social dynamics are poison to accurate predictions.
Tom,
In addition to “MD” not necessarily being good with statistics practicing physicians probably don’t have any more direct access to data than other people To make a case about why hospitals are under stress requires good data– and I think that’s pretty hard to find.
For the moment I strongly suspect people explaining why hospitals are under stress, by how much and so on are just winging it with data. Often they are just echoing what they heard from other sources they “trust”– but that leads to tons of bias.
.
I don’t doubt hospitals are understress. It would make sense if they were. But I don’t know what the main cause or causes are. I suspect it’s a mix of reasons. But — like everyone else who doesn’t post an analysis I’m guessing.
I think working in the medical profession and especially working in a hospital requires very real emotional detachment, you just can’t get emotionally invested in outcomes and last very long. The medical community still is the profession that is affected the most here and complains the least in my opinion. They deserve to be honored. Contrast that with … ummmm … teachers unions.
.
The medical community has been dealing with their problems (infection risk, emotional turmoil) for a long time though and people are dying at only a moderately higher rate now. Teachers and other professions are dealing with this type of risk for the first time so it is a bit more emotional.
Tom–
I agree with you that the medical community deserves to be honored in all of this. But I still don’t necessarily think a practicing physician necessarily can or has done an analysis to fully understand everything about how or why hospitals are stressed. I’m not saying they are ignorant. But it’s a bit like a guy in the trenches in WWI. He just doesn’t know everything that’s going on even though he is in the thick of things.
No matter how brave or valiant a doctor is, they are probably not going home at night to compile statistics to see the fraction of ER patients who were vaccinated or unvaccinated– nor spending time teasing out whether people are consistently being asked if they are vaccinated and so on.
So respecting and honoring someone is not the same as thinking they are omniscient. Meanwhile saying they are not omniscient is not saying they don’t know anything about what’s going on. They do.
Heh.
Glenn Greenwald’s humorous and overwrought (as usual) take on the Jan 6th celebration:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around
Since no one bothered to read the good Doctor’s math I present it here. Statistics? We don’t need no stinkin statistics. This is logic and arithmetic…. And it makes sense to me:
“Let’s look at the link between cases and hospitalizations
We’re admitting 15K-20K COVID patients a day!
If you use NY data, may be half are incidental “with COVID”
So 7.5K-10K every day
In prior waves, you could look at cases today
And reliably predict 6%-9% of them would be hospitalized a week later
Now, closer to 2%-3%
And since we’re missing a LOT of cases now because folks testing + at home
Hospitalization rate is even lower
But we still have a problem
and there are a lot of Americans in that group
My estimate? At least 40 million
Though in reality, probably more
And I’m only focusing on adults
So let’s do some math
They are VERY high risk for getting severe disease
There are 20 million people >65 who are vaccinated but not boosted
They remain at risk of getting severe disease if infected
And 30M adults 50-64 vaccinated but not boosted
If 25% have high risk conditions
And if 30% have some protection from prior infection
That’s still at least 15M people <65 at risk for bad outcomes
Though likely more
A quarter could easily get infected in Omicron wave
And 10% of them hospitalized
That's 1M+ hospitalizations
There is no way our healthcare system can handle that in the next month or 6 weeksâ€
Steve, Tom. Thanks as always for helping me understand the politics in US and the perspective of conservatives.
The thing about omicron which seems too often ignored is the rapid rise (to multiple times higher cases per day) followed by a rapid fall in cases. The number of people infected during that spike is relatively low as a fraction of the total population… suggesting that omicron is extremely infective, but does not infect everyone, or at least doesn’t provoke significant illness in many people that it infects. Which is to say: lots of people seem to have existing resistance to omicron illness, in spite of much higher transmissibility and high rates of illness among those who do not have resistance.
Phil,
There are poling analyses in the USA which show the divergence of political opinion has been driven mainly by those on the “left” moving aggressively left over the past ~20 years. Those on the “right” have hardly changed their political opinions at all. This is consistent with my personal observations: people on the left are the ones who’s policy positions have changed (eg, now explicitly embracing racial preferences in EVERYTHING).
.
That doesn’t make the political divide any smaller (and it is indeed huge in the USA), but it is disingenuous when those on the left claim people on the right are responsible for the growing political divide….. the truth is exactly the opposite.
Russell,
It was a series of tweets. It involved numbers and speculation. There is no real “math” to check!
Russell, looks like NY and London have peaked without crashing the health system. Peaks happening at different times helps. I’d look at Zvi latest https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/01/07/omicron-post-13-outlook/
Our health system is frantically preparing. Not at all sure that we have same capacity and seeing Ireland with similar population and vaccination rates hit 20,000/d and rising is sobering.
Steve, by definition, I would have expected conservative positions to remain the same, and similarly expect “progressive” to, well, progress. “Moving aggressively left” means what exactly? (definition of “left” is somewhat subjective and it sure means something a lot different here compared to US). Any pointers to an analysis of those polls and what how polls defined “leftist” positions?
Phil,
See: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/pew-research-center-study-shows-that-democrats-have-shifted-to-the-extreme-left/
.
And many others. The demand is for equality of outcome, not equal
opportunity. It shows in the idiocy of what passes for easonexfor jou by lapasses
Phil Scadden, Thank you for the link….. lots to digest there.
Or perhaps I should say that I expect conservative position to progress generationally. I doubt many conservatives would own pre-civil rights movement of ’60s positions on race today. Even less a desire for the 18th century political structures that the War of Independence rebelled against.
Phil,
See for example https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/pew-research-center-study-shows-that-democrats-have-shifted-to-the-extreme-left/
and others. This is perfectly consistent with my personal observations: those on tge left are ever more left. But far worse than that, the left ever more rejects the legitimacy of any other POV.
Phil,
The history of the political parties in the US is rather convoluted. The Democrats were in power in the south during the civil rights era and were against it at the time (unsurprisingly), so they wouldn’t own their positions either.
.
Civil Rights Act vote by party:
The original House version:[30]
Democratic Party: 152–96 (61–39%)
Republican Party: 138–34 (80–20%)
The Senate version:[30]
Democratic Party: 46–21 (69–31%)
Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)
.
Expecting to find consistency and ethical purity in US politics is going to be a rather long and fruitless search. What you will find are a few long standing principles (over about the last 50 years) that separate the parties which are more about economic policy, levels of taxation, freedom of speech, and personal liberty.
.
It’s always easy to forget that the parties do actually agree on many things and unsurprisingly don’t fight over those very much. Capitalism, free markets, strong education, strong military, adventurous and occasionally disastrous foreign interventions, oppose China and Russia, and of course that the opposing party’s politics are reprehensible even if we agree with them. Each party has babbling extremists that get a lot of press, occasionally they become President.
Data from Colorado, early in the pandemic: 275/1150 covid deaths with, not due to.
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/coronavirus/colorado-now-breaking-down-deaths-due-to-covid-19-versus-people-who-died-with-covid-19
.
Data from North Dakota:
In 2020, 219 with, 1122 due to
In 2021, 118 with, 569 due to
https://www.health.nd.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/north-dakota-coronavirus-cases
.
It seems hard to find these, but I have seen many such reports over the last two years.
Steve, that is a FANTASTIC (if depressing) report. Just the list of “political values” is enlightening in its own right. The loss of the center (pgs 12/13) is the scariest bit. Hard to see how “normal” democracy works in such a situation. Another interesting bit is that parties cultural wars (enlarging of the rift) seems to start in 1999. Why then? I need to digest when I am not supposed to be working.
Tom, fascinating and LOL. However, I dont expect to find consistency and ethical purity in politics full stop, so not exactly surprised.
Thanks again.
MikeM
And the 1150 includes the 878. So that means 878 of the 1150 died due to and only 272 died with while not “due to”.
That’s many more died “due to” than merely with.
Everyone agrees that some people who die of something else (including falling off buildings etc), die “with” Covid. But this ratio seems to align with MikeN’s estimate. The number dieing merely with while not “due to” is a smallish fraction.
But yes– now you have cited data that shows at least in one case, it’s about 20-25%– who died merely with. It’s a smallish number- but not zero.
lucia (Comment #208476): “That’s many more died “due to†than merely with.”
.
75% vs 25%. And about 80/20 for North Dakota. Which is what I claimed.
Phil,
Re leftist extremism: The position on immigration taking by most Democrats (including Obama) roughly a decade ago, and by Sanders still in early 2016, is now considered irredeemably racist. The position on gay marriage taken by people like Obama and Hillary less than a decade ago is now deemed so homophobic as to mark anyone holding such a position as deserving of being cast out of polite society. Less than a decade ago, if you suggested that the Democrats would soon adopt their current position on trans people, you would have been laughed down as a purveyor of a paranoid fantasy. And so on.
MikeM
Yes. I said you’ve now cited one case that’s about a quarter. But the article discusses the uncertainty in tallying and it’s also not inconsistent with MikeN’s estimate it’s probably more like 10%.
.
Beyond that– if there are fraction of people deemed to have died “with” covid as a number of dead exceeds the fraction of infected, that would tend to indicate Covid is contributing to their deaths in some way that is not recognized. MikeN’s estimate seems to be based on this principle, and it is a sound one.
MikeM
The article you link then links to a presentation that discussed what Colorodo was following back in may 2020. CDC guidance would not count these “with Covid” deaths as “Covid deaths”.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MgFjeTnQwBwgg4z5z4062rWfTTCUnEYU/view
So it seems the death counts were not inflated by the “with” (unless by mistake) . These are now being counted expressessly in CO as a separate category. That would mean the “due to covid” deaths reported now should be comparable to the “due to covid” deaths before CO added the new category. At least that’s what your article and the underlying viewgraphs seem to be communicate.
North Dakota has twice as many head of cattle as people. Extrapolating public health data from there to the entire US is ridiculous.
Phil,
“Hard to see how “normal†democracy works in such a situation.”
.
I think it is easy to see, so long as both sides agree to common rules. The problem is that progressives *do not* agree to the rules…. they will do just about anything to impose their desired policies, even when the process they adopt to impose those policies is far more damaging to the social and political fabric than whatever policy they are trying to change. When the supreme court declares a progressive policy either unlawful on its face or contrary to the constitution and blocks it, the reaction is predictable: threats to increase the size of the court until there are enough progressives to ensure a rubber stamp approval of every leftist policy. When the senate blocks leftist policies, the response is predicable: add new states which will ensure a leftist majority. When a president is elected with less than 50% popular vote, the reaction is equally predicable: directly undermine the constitution to bypass the electoral process the constitution describes. The political divide is, of course, the fault of people on both sides of that divide, but IMHO, those on the left bear the large majority of the fault.
.
I see no solution to the growing political divide except for sensible voters to keep the left out of power, more to keep them from damaging our system of government than to keep them from implementing destructive policies. The ongoing swing in political affiliation among people of hispanic descent suggests to me there is a good chance that will happen over the next few decades.
Russell,
All states that release data are data. But what I haven’t seen is data that suggest the “with covid” numbers every inflated the “due to” numbers. At least as far back as May, the CDC guidelines were that those people should not be reported as having died of covid. So now, some states are counting and reporting both separately. That doesn’t mean they used to include the newly counted category in the old list.
.
It’s worth nothing that the article MikeM links explains why Colorado has added the extra category:
.
Now, perhaps the “theory” that those “with covid” were padding the list of those dued “from covid” isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory. But the new breakdown is precisely to list the “with covids” who were previously not in the “from covid” list. Counting them makes it clearer that they are not on the list.
.
The link to the further documentations shows the criteria for having been deemed to have died “from covid” has been the same since May 2020. (You have to click through to see that the date of the “latest” guidance from the CDC was last may.).
.
I don’t know ore details from North Dakota, but I suspect they too followed CDC guidelines for “from covid” but like CO decided to clarify. Doing so means adding a new list so people can see the “with” are in addition to those who have been deemed to have died “from”.
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/coronavirus/colorado-now-breaking-down-deaths-due-to-covid-19-versus-people-who-died-with-covid-19
Sad day… It’s my 12 year old granddaughter’s birthday and she’s confined to her room with covid. Mild symptoms, but positive both pcr and rapid tests. She is fully vaxxed and pulse-ox levels are running 99-100, so signs are good. I told her that her immunities will be stronger when this is over, but that didn’t seem to cheer her up much.
Hope she feels better soon!
.
I also would not be cheered up by the fact that my immunity would be better after I get better. 🙂
.
lucia (Comment #208484): “At least as far back as May, the CDC guidelines were that those people should not be reported as having died of covid.”
.
Yesterday, Bret Baier interviewed CDC director Walensky. He asked
Are you claiming that the answer to that question is “zero”? Or that it shouold be zero, but there might be a small number of errors?
.
That is not what Walensky said. She dodged the question.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cdc-director-walensky-distinctions-covid-related-deaths-data-forthcoming
MikeM
I suppose you think you are making some point. You may have to make it directly because I’m not going to try to infer what it is. Being fat is a co-morbidity. So is diabetes. So is being old. I’m sure many who died of covid were fat, had diabetes, were old etc. No one denies this.
.
A person asking how many people had “co-morbidities” does not cast doubt on the list of those diagnosed as having died “of” covid dying “of” covid.
Presumably you post these rhetoricals because think that the answer not being “zero” suggest some sort of problem with the counting of those who died “of” covid. That the answer is not “zero” doesn’t suggest that the fat, diabetic or other people didn’t die “of” covid. Nor would we expect no mistakes were made.
Even “dodging” the question doesn’t mean they didn’t die of covid.
.
Yeah… politicians and spokes people dodge questions all the time. And when the questions are stupid and leading, even normal people “dodge” them.
And oddly, she didn’t dodge Brent Beairs question:
He asked if she knew. The answer was YES. That’s a direct answer to the question he asked.
.
Now he may have wanted her to answer some other question– like give the numbers. But he didn’t ask that. And, in fact, she volunteered more than he asked by telling him those data would be coming. Maybe they are.
.
He, you and others might not like her response. But she more than answered. That was not a “dodge”.
Cases still on a sharp positive incline in Illinois. Jim’s dance teacher’s daughter tested positive and cancelled lessons. Her daughter tested positive.
My neighbor tested positive. He’s posting regularly on Facebook so I’m pretty sure his symptoms are mild. I asked him if he needed someone to drop groceries off. 🙂
.
I made more of my (possibly quack) protective nasal spray (that Jim doesn’t use.)
.
My dance pro competed at “The Snow Ball”. The pro-pro competition only had 3 pro couples! There are usually about 2 dozen but illness and just staying away reduced that down. ( My pro won. But still, 3 couples!)
.
Chicago and Cook County are requiring proof of vaccination for restaurants, bars, gyms etc. (I live in DuPage Co. )
lucia,
I did NOT ask any rhetorical questions.
You are splitting hairs to a ludicrous degree. The issue of “with” vs “due to” is very much in the news. Fauci brought it up recently. I think that Walenky did also and has the new governor of New York. According to CDC data, under 10% of covid deaths are people who had absolutely nothing else wrong with them. That is not the issue. The issue is whether people dies of covid (even if obese or old, etc.) or of something else (cancer drug, OD, etc) but subsequent to a positive covid test. One could argue that Baier’s question was technically ambiguous. But in the context of statements like Fauci’s, the meaning was clear. And if not, Walensky could have asked for clarification. She did not.
.
Q: Do you know the time?
A: Yes.
Technically, that is an answer to the question. But it is sure to annoy the questioner, at least in any context other than a legal proceeding. By any normal standard, Walensky dodged the question.
Proof of cosmic justice on the “long arc of history”: Alexandria Occasio Cortez, defender of insane mask mandates, vacations in Miami with her husband for a few days….. maskless, and visits at least one crowded gay bar, posing maskless for photos with a “trans-woman” double her size, and comes down with, what else ….. covid!
.
So lemme see: AOC can choose to go maskless as she parties, and put herself “and eveyone else” at risk, but 5 year olds in school have to weak masks and avoid contact with other kids. AOC is the definition of a stupid, dishonest, arrogant hypocrite.
It should be pointed out that some unknown count of people who check themselves into the hospital “with covid†that haven’t tested positive are actually suffering from serious symptoms that are “from covidâ€, thus covid in fact being the origin cause anyway. The hospital tests them and they would officially be in the “with covid†category. Clearly broken legs and cancer are not such categories, but “respiratory distress†and a lot of other related maladies would be. (Older person gets weak walking because of covid and falls down and breaks hip).
.
One can try to parse these out, but is it really that helpful in the long run? It’s a bunch of work that likely just brings more uncertainty and judgment in classification into the system. The dumb trends we have are useful and can be accurately counted. If we are looking for the true serious illness count of omicron relative to delta than this is certainly a confounder. Perhaps a few selected largish hospitals could be tasked with investigating this more closely instead of the entire system.
.
As we have seen the CDC is having enough problems working out basic data like the omicron variant percentage, so it’s not likely they will get this right anyway.
lucia (Comment #208488),
lucia: “He asked if she knew. The answer was YES. That’s a direct answer to the question he asked.”
.
I don’t think so. “Yes” in that context is quite likely not an answer, it might well be just an acknowledgement of the question. The latter is very likely since it was obviously not a yes/no question.
.
Since the question mentioned the total number of deaths, it was obviously about the totals to date, not omicron. Yet Walensky then went on about omicron while ignoring all previous variants.
.
It sounds to me like she dodged the question that was asked but then said that the CDC is *now* tracking the distinction with regard to omicron.
—————-
The authorities have steadfastly ignored the with/from question until the omicron wave hit. Now they are talking about it. I think that what is happening is that they realized they need an exit ramp since the public is fed up. That means that they now need to ramp down the terror machine. But they also realize that there are going to be a LOT of hospitalizations and deaths “with” omicron. So to ramp down the terror, they need to distinguish between those and the relatively small numbers “from” omicron.
I personally think our “democracy” is working almost perfectly. We have open and fair elections using a very defined set of rules everyone knows. There are established ways to monitor the vote and to challenge the results. The lunatics and fringe who howl at the results are given the opportunity to prove their claims and they are ignored when they fail to produce the evidence.
.
The governing class can and will be voted out of power if * they * fail to convince the voters they have their best interests at heart. Trump. Unskilled politicians who fail to govern effectively will be removed. Trump. Challenges to valid votes that fail to produce material evidence of fraud will be ignored. Trump.
.
It is all working as designed in my view.
.
If you read all the threat to democracy babbling media articles just try to find one that isn’t based on the premise of “the right people are not getting elected even though the rules are being followed”. Good luck. If the rules are being followed and we get a bunch of Trump crazies in office, democracy is working. Find one article that acknowledges this.
.
They are almost entirely based on a fear from the governing class of being excluded from their * entitlement * to power. Those people should be able to govern better in theory, but they lose focus sometimes and need to be reminded of where the power is actually vested in a democracy.
Healthy 12 year olds should not be primed to be scared of dying from covid. That we have this situation is ludicrous.
Tom,
Yup. Same here. It’s just the usual rhetoric.
According to the NY Times: “Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male.â€
.
It would not surprise me to learn that Harris thinks that all of her predecessors were white. Or if the Times believes that. But it is not so. And I am not referring to some Elizabeth Warren sort of rumored non-white ancestry.
FYI: VSP fashionably discuss a civil war at NPR today. Skip it if you are sane, there are a 1000 others just like this.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/10/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state
.
Scholars, which we all know are unbiased and evenhanded on this subject are exclusively asked their opinions.
“Moreover, it did little to settle the constitutional issue of “states’ rights,†a problematic point in our national conversation “.
.
Love the scare quotes. We definitely need to get rid of those dang states rights so those rednecks can be brought under our rightful control, but but but they have lots of guns! I can’t read any of these things without laughing about how detached they are. I live in a 50/50 county in a 50/50 state and nobody here worries about a civil war. It is only those people living in impenetrable deeply blue bubbles who have fever dreams of this sort.
Mike M.,
Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s VP, was 3/8 First Nations and a member of the Kaw Nation. So Harris is indeed wrong that she is the first non-white VP. But I think that compared to, say, Dan Quayle, she is still being given the kid glove treatment by most of the MSM.
Reporting of Covid death to WHO is supposed to follow WHO guidelines. https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/classification/icd/covid-19/guidelines-cause-of-death-covid-19-20200420-en.pdf?sfvrsn=35fdd864_2&download=true
I would assume that US was conforming to the guidelines.The existence of the document doesn’t look like “ignored by authorities” to me.
The acid test is excess mortality. If you want to argue that impact of COVID is overstated, then comparing reported covid deaths to excess mortality is the way to go.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208495)â€Healthy 12 year olds should not be primed to be scared of dying from covid.†Do you know any healthy 12 year olds who are scared of dying from covid? I do not.
MikeM
It appears to be the answer to the question he asked. He asked what was clearly a yes/no question. She aswered yes and then elaborated. You may not like the answer– but she gave it.
She elaborated listing a reason why they are especially interested in looking into this. That’s not “evading”.
If the interviewer had wanted to re-focus on a different thing, he should have.
Mike M
This series by you looks you asked me two rhetorical questions:
My answer to “are you claiming is…?” is “no. that’s not my claim”.
My answer is not “it should be zero but there might be a small number of errors”?
So if those weren’t rhetorical questions, i’ve now answered them.
Wallensky’s answer to the first question of Brett’s two question string was
“”Yes of course with omicron we’re following that very carefully,” Walensky responded. “Our death registry of course takes a few weeks…to collect. And of course omicron has just been with us for a few weeks. But those data will be forthcoming.””.
So the answer to Brett’s first question was “Yes”. (She volunteered a reason why they looked dug into the data to find the answer. You seem to object to her elaborating, but. Oh. Well.) Her second answer is “The data will be forthcoming”. That’s a pretty full, complete, not remotely evasive answer to what Brett asked.
You may wish there was a different answer. You may wish she hadn’t given extra information about what motivated them to find out how many were due to blah.. blah…. You may not like that you have to wait to read the data. But the number without the report would be pretty valueless.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208499),
Yes, Charles Curtis. He did not just have Indian blood; he spent most of his boyhood, up to age 13, on the Kaw (Kansas) reservation and spoke the language. But when the tribe was relocated to Oklahoma, his Indian grandparents sent him to live in town with his white grandparents so that he could have a future.
The great Covid Cadaver Count Controversy [CCCC]. Who cares! For those of you who do care, there is an interesting excess death dashboard at CDC. It allows you to toggle various scenarios. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I have no expertise in such matters but it seems to me that this is a squishy number by its nature. If you have a bunch of old fat guys with health problems [Ahem!] in intensive care and they also have Covid, I think it would be hard to determine just what pushed them all over the edge.
I feel confident that between half a million and a million souls have had a premature rendezvous with their maker in the US, and that meeting was facilitated by Covid. The exact number is important to amateur internet statisticians and will be important to covid historians and future medical researchers, but not to me. It’s too late to do anything about it now.
Also, I think there probably will be other ways to skin this cat [sorry lucia]. Like maybe analyze the death counts for the major diseases over time. It’s a squishy number so innovative approximations are in order.
NOTE: The dashboard is at the bottom of the CDC page
Phil
Yep.
Based on what CO people said, they “Covid Deaths” followed the protocol in the document you link.
But, (owing to the people complaining about “with covid”) they are now counting a second category: those “with covid”.
The two current tallies are:
(1) “Due to covid” which matches the previous tally of Covid Deaths and
(2) “With Covid” which deaths were previously not tallied. They were just “not covid deaths” and uncounted. These weren’t “hidden” inside “covid deaths”.
Of course, I am sure mistakes were made.
.
I don’t doubt that with post-processing someone will find mistakes. Mistakes will have been made before CO’s change and after. They’ve probably been made for other diseases.
.
Since those clamoring for people to track the “with Covid” deaths are clamoring, it looks like the CDC is combing through stuff and making a report about past data, current data yada yada. Given at least some need for care, and the fact that government work is going to pass through a lot of hands, this is taking more time than the “with Covid tally demanders” like. But it’s sort of just the normal amount of time.
Australia’s covid all time curve looks like something Michael Mann would draw. Coming soon to many countries who managed covid well so far. How is China going to manage the Olympics?
.
The contagiousness of Omicron does mean people should reconsider their polices, including the US. I can’t however keep the thought at bay that the knowledge class all of sudden decided to change their minds on this when their peer group started getting infected at a high rate. When people of impeccable morals get infected, things are different. The covid sanctimony (wear your damn masks!, pandemic of the unvaccinated!) has ended and I guess that’s a good thing.
Russel,
There can always be arguments about “what” killed someone. My mother in law died “of” a urinary tract infection. She was 99 yo, had dementia and was very frail. Had she not been extremely frail, she would not have died of a urinary tract infection.
.
I could complain she died of “old age” “with” a urinary tract infection– but it was listed as “from”. The infection did weaken her. Even with antibiotics, they couldn’t clear it. She died.
.
There are going to be cases like that. There are with all diseases that weaken people.
Pfizer says omicron specific vaccine ready by March, ready for people in ???. It will be interesting to see how effective it is, hard to say. I doubt it will be 95% against infection. Omicron is too fast for that to happen again I would guess.
.
“A Dec. 31 study by the United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency found that the effectiveness of Pfizer or Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine against * symptomatic infection * dropped to around 10% by 20 weeks after the second dose. “
Tom,
It doesn’t have to be 95% effective for me to take it! My standards are the same as for the first vaccine. I’m not and never have been in the “it’s gotta be perfect” camp with vaccines (or medicine.)
My 10% estimate came from looking at the total number who die of anything, multiplying by an estimate of the proportion of the population that are infected at a given instant, and dividing by total COVID deaths.
I said I didn’t care about Covid death tallies, but here I am, falling down the rabbit hole. From The Economist, “Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries†https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Two things are striking: The appalling performance of the United States during this time when compared to the rest of the world. Our excess death number, 316 per 100k, is right up there with third world countries. Italy, at 289 is the only first world country near us. But it gets worse. The US reported
200,000 LESS Covid deaths than excess deaths during this time period. This leads me to speculate that the US is undercounting Covid deaths.
MikeN (Comment #208512): “My 10% estimate came from looking at the total number who die of anything, multiplying by an estimate of the proportion of the population that are infected at a given instant, and dividing by total COVID deaths.”
.
A perfectly reasonable approach. But the proportion infected is hugely uncertain. First, because most infections are never detected and second, because people can give a positive PCR test for weeks or months after clearing an infection.
MikeM,
The other “flaw” is people “with Covid” are actually more likely to die, even of things that don’t see to be “from Covid”. (E.G. Heart attacks, stroke, falling down stairs or other accidents induced by confusion or dizzyness). So the number of deaths “with Covid” would exceed the fraction you would ‘expect’.
.
If this happened, these deaths also might be diagnosed as “with Covid” by a coroner, the same way, say, diabetes or high blood pressure can be “with obesity” or emphasema is “with smoking addition”. The association of lots of death “with” something is found by later inspection of death certificates. That is a slow tedious process.
.
If “mild” Covid or even “post Covid” does sometimes trigger things the way obesity or smoking does, (and it’s plausible) then the consequence would be the number of deaths caused by Covid could be under estimated by the CDC protocol because they are deemed “with” when Covid was a causal trigger and the death should be more properly characterized as “from”.
Russell Klier,
I would expect the US to have high excess deaths compared to most other advanced countries because we are far and away less healthy than other countries. We have excess obesity, Type II diabetes and probably several more conditions that would be counted as co-morbidities. That also partly explains why we spend more on healthcare.
Speaking of healthcare, CA is trying to implement single payer healthcare again. The proposed tax increases are high, but probably nowhere near high enough. Private insurance is supposed to be banned and the taxes will apply for a full year even if you don’t spend a full year in CA.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/single-payer-medicine-makes-a-california-comeback-gavin-newsom-xavier-becerra-healthcare-11641853914?st=2ajdfk648kv7et7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Biden has lost his mind. Publicly advocating for “exceptions” to the filibuster while he knows he doesn’t have the votes to pass it is just a misread of the electorate and bad politics. There are quite a few independents who trust their local government more than they trust the federal government to run local and state elections. He was on the record for being against filibuster changes at some point and now he want to override state election law changes (aimed directly at red states) on a narrow party line vote. There just isn’t any real payback here as I just don’t think the electorate is buying the alleged danger of election law changes which as far as I can tell are inconsequential.
.
Curiously many voting activists from his own party are not showing up for the Biden speech because the changes aren’t extreme enough for them.
.
It’s also just not forward looking. What is the final outcome of this policy? The Republicans will just turn around and “fix” voting laws in blue states when they have federal power. Doing this on a party line basis is crazy.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208516)
“we are far and away less healthy than other countries. We have excess obesity, Type II diabetes and probably several more conditions that would be counted as co-morbiditiesâ€.
Yes I agree, but that does not explain excess deaths in this context from The Economist:
“excess deathsâ€: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent yearsâ€
The US had 1,036,850 more deaths during Covid than we had historically. Something else is going on. Oddly the total US Covid deaths during this period was 799,550. So 240,000 more people died than can be explained by reported Covid deaths. My hypothesis is that we under-counted Covid deaths.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
One significant source of excess deaths in the US has been drug OD’s.
.
I tend to distrust estimates that provide no error bars. How accurate is their method? For instance, they compare deaths to a trend line. How long a time period is used to establish the trend? How accurate is the slope?
.
Here is an example of how that can go wrong. A mild flu season leads to a lower then normal number of deaths. If that is the final year used for the tend, it will reduce the slope of the trend line and therefore will reduce the expected number of deaths for the first projected year. But in fact the expected number of deaths should go up. That is because many of the people who did not die during the mild flu season will die in the next year or so anyway. So normal fluctuations can get amplified.
Today’s new phrase: “undervaccinated people” ha ha. You have to be boosted to be in the cool kid club now.
The excess death undercount has been going on since the beginning and nobody can explain it that I have seen. I don’t think it is a conspiracy as the death counting process seems pretty solid in the US. It’s probably a combination of a lot of things, OD’s as Mike M mentioned, failure to seek care for other problems due to covid fear, etc. Last year many articles pointed to “deaths of despair” as being a big part. Otherwise there would have to be some nationwide conspiracy which has no apparent point or a lot of people dying from covid at home who never got tested. My guess is this is the second order effects of a global pandemic that is killing many marginal people, either mental illness or poor health. Perhaps we will see less deaths overall for several years after the pandemic stress ends.
I recently saw some data that are relevant to the issue of excess deaths. They are from Minnesota and may be found here:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2022/01/09/more-on-deaths/
I don’t know why they did not give the numbers for 65+. Note that the data are for the first 11 months of each year.
.
As of the end of 2021, MN had 10,656 official covid deaths. From Russell’s link, the USA has excess deaths about 30% higher than covid deaths. If MN is similar, they would have about 3200 excess non-covid deaths.
.
For ages 5-30, non-natural deaths (homicide, suicide, accident) were roughly a wash. Natural deaths were up by about 350 for 2020 & 2021 combined. 90% were non-covid, presumably due to deferred medical care. There is no way that any significant number of the others were uncounted covid deaths. Note that for Jan-Nov 2019, there were 858 deaths from all causes in the 5-30 age group; that is probably about 1% of all deaths in MN. Yet that group accounted for 10% of the non-covid excess deaths.
.
Now look at the 31-64 age group. Non-natural deaths were up by about 600 over 2020-21. They were essentially all accidental, i.e, drug ODs. Natural deaths were up by about 2100, of which 1300 were covid. In 2019, this age group was about 9% of all deaths in MN.
.
So people 5-64 accounted for about 10% of all deaths in MN in 2019 and about 14% of covid deaths in 2020-21. But they accounted for 35-40% of excess non-covid deaths. It would be nice to have the 65+ numbers. It is possible that there are uncounted covid deaths among the elderly. But I think it clear that the large majority of excess non-covid deaths are not due to covid but instead are due to a criminally misguided response to covid.
OD deaths are well-counted. Deaths are well-counted. What sources of uncertainity bother you? Methodology here – https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#techNotes
Note that baseline is 2013 to present.
Russell Klier,
Yes, it does. Did I not say co-morbidities? Why yes, I did. People who would otherwise not die are dying with or from COVID because they are also obese, etc. I suspect that we are indeed undercounting COVID deaths, but probably not all the excess deaths are directly COVID related. I would be very surprised if there are not excess deaths related to the unintended consequences of lockdowns, which also, to at least some extent, correlated with COVID infection rates.
Phil Scadden,
From your link:
Which is basically what I said to Russell.
Edit: Note that just because various different causes of death are well counted does not mean that the reported excess deaths were corrected for them. Very likely, they weren’t. Otherwise they would not have included the caveat I quoted.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208523): “OD deaths are well-counted. Deaths are well-counted. What sources of uncertainity bother you?”
.
Is that addressed at me? If so then: All predictions of the future are uncertain. A competent analyst attempts to assess that uncertainty.
The CDC method seems a lot more sophisticated than the Financial Times one. That does not automatically make it better. They recently changed from extrapolating from 4 years to 6 years; it sounds like that reduced the estimated excess deaths by about 110K. That would be about half the difference between covid deaths and excess deaths. But I am not seeing numbers. I suppose that is because I won’t bow to Google. How do the CDC numbers compare to the Financial Times?
I was not looking to future prediction nor postulating that all excess death was covid related. However, excess death is just that – a comparison of actual deaths compared to trend. I do not think there is much in way of significant errors. If covid deaths were wildly overstated then you expect covid death count to be more than excess deaths. If you postulate that it is only a bit worse than flu, then can compare to excess death in other flu seasons. If you postulate that excess death is ODs, then substract actual ODs from baseline ODs (https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates). Because deaths are well-counted, excess mortality is a useful hypothesis testing tool.
Many suicides are OD’s, it’s hard to tell the difference in many cases. So you have to be careful with sources. People with agendas will overcount to their preference.
.
There was a certain stigma attached to dying from covid (this is so ridiculous BTW) so it’s possible many people who died under private care or at home pushed to not have that listed as a cause.
.
I really don’t think there is a Cuomo type of cover up here for political purposes, it’s too easy to get caught. It is a bit of a mystery and yet another example of the CDC not doing their job by not having an answer (maybe they do???).
Phil Scadden,
The baseline estimate of annual deaths does not have a variance of zero. Neither does the actual count. As pointed out in your CDC link, there can be a significant difference between the calculation of excess deaths using the mean of the estimate of the annual death rate and the estimate plus the 95% confidence limit. The graphs really need error bars.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208528): “I was not looking to future prediction nor postulating that all excess death was covid related. However, excess death is just that – a comparison of actual deaths compared to trend.”
.
Nonsense. Excess deaths is a comparison of a future prediction with actual deaths. To pretend that there are no errors in the future prediction is very dumb, if not intentionally obtuse.
.
” I do not think there is much in way of significant errors.”
.
Based on what? For the uncertainty to be greater than the difference between excess deaths and covid deaths, the error in the future prediction would only have to be about 4%. That is quite plausible.
Ok. I misunderstood what you meant by “future”. Yes, there is variance in estimated expected deaths and that link put them on the graph (it shows average and upper bound). By “significant errors”, I mean the error in estimating actual deaths (they are well counted). When covid deaths are reported as high, the excess deaths are high.
So taking, for instance, week ending jan 16 2021,
Expected average death 61,000, upper bound 63,000, Actual 87,000. Reported covid deaths 23,000.
NYT:
“A new study of nearly 70,000 Covid patients in California demonstrates that Omicron causes less severe disease than other coronavirus variants. The new research, posted online Tuesday, aligns with similar findings from South Africa, Britain and Denmark, as well as a host of experiments on animals.
Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron patients identified from electronic medical records of Kaiser Permanente of Southern California, a large health system, Dr. Lewnard and his colleagues found that not a single patient went on a ventilator during that time.
“It’s truly a viral factor that accounts for reduced severity,†said Joseph Lewnard, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.”
“Three-quarters of the positive samples contained the Omicron variant, whereas the rest were Delta.”
“The variant cut hospital stays by more than three days, a reduction of 70 percent compared with Delta.
Fourteen of the Delta-infected patients died, while only one Omicron patient did. That difference translated into a 91 percent reduction in the risk of death.”
“Even among unvaccinated people, however, Omicron was less likely to lead to hospitalizations than Delta.”
.
Very good news. There is still a death lag time that will come into play and likely reduce those numbers I suspect, still good.
With Covid, from Covid or under Covid, this is bad and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better…. “U.S. hospitals are caring for the highest number of patients with Covid-19 reported during the pandemic, according to federal government data, as the Omicron variant worsens pressures on the already strained facilities.†“Covid-19 Hospitalizations Reported in U.S. Hit New High†https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-hospitalizations-reported-in-u-s-hit-new-high-11641924596
Tom Scharf,
While any factual/rational analysis will show a drastic reduction in risk of hospitalization, and an even greater reduction in risk of death, the covid hysteria will continue. The pandemic long ago stopped being about reasonable public health policies, and became a means to enable many people’s very worst personal tendencies.
Well…. weekly average cases have been down for three days in Illinois. Too late to say it’s turned for sure. But since up fast-down fast seems to be the dominant pattern for Omicron, I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Lucia,
“too late”? Or ‘too early’?
.
The up seems faster than the down. That said, in many places there are still a lot of delta cases, which confuses both the shape of the ‘omicron’ surge and the rates of hospitalization and death.
There is ever more noise about Hillary running in 2024. Smacks of desperation combined foolishness. Hillary will be 77 by election day 2024. Combine that with her almost limitless political baggage and the now well documented dishonesty of “Russia, Russia, Russia”, and she could never win.
.
More interesting is the growing recognition that Dems really have nobody who is a credible candidate for 2024. The endless lust for power among elderly Dem leaders has frozen out younger potential candidates.
Looks like the Hillary Clinton hysteria will continue. Just like with AOC it’s very obvious, strange, and deranged sexual frustrations.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208534): “Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital.”
.
That includes people hospitalized “with” omicron, now referred to as “incidental” hospitalization.
.
The surge in covid hospitalizations is a surge in incidental hospitalizations.
.
I have previously cited results from Florida and NYC indicating that 50-60% of covid hospitalizations are now incidental. Here are simlar reports from Colorado
https://coloradosun.com/2022/01/12/colorado-covid-omicron-hospital-patients/
and Tennessee
https://www.mainstreet-nashville.com/life/as-many-as-half-of-hospital-omicron-cases-are-incidental-wright-says/article_dd6e643e-6f09-11ec-8fe6-ebb84e9490ce.html
.
But there is still a lot of delta here. In the UK, incidental is now 80% of hospitalizations (I have not watched the video and am not sure that these particular numbers are to be trusted).
https://shavatv.co.za/videos/most-omicron-hospitalisations-incidental/
It is nice that we are now getting numbers on incidental covid hospitalizations. Too bad that we have not been getting them all along.
.
If incidental hospitalizations are proportional to prevalence in the community, then the fraction of hospitalizations that are incidental is directly related to the chance of being hospitalized for severe covid (which I will define as bad enough to require hospitalization).
.
So if omicron is 50% incidental and delta was 30% incidental, then the ratio of severe to incidental has gone from 7/3 to 1/1; that is a 56% reduction in the chance of severe disease, consistent with the CA numbers cited by Tom Scharf (Comment #208534). If omicron is 60% incidental and delta was 20%, then the ratio has gone from 4/1 to 2/3; an 83% change. And if we have gone from 5% to 60%, as claimed in the Colorado Sun article, then we have a 96% reduction in the probability of severe disease. That seems unlikely.
.
Note that either there was a lot of incidental covid hospitalizations previously or the drop in hospitalization rate with omicron is truly spectacular.
.
The above numbers are conservative since delta is still around and incidental hospitalization will continue to rise for weeks after omicron has peaked. That is because people continue to test positive for weeks after clearing the infection.
Lucia, Illinois may have reason for optimism. I did a quick look at the “curveâ€. It helps to look at it on a logarithmic graph. Here: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=bra&areas=gbr&areas=tun&areas=nam&areasRegional=usil&cumulative=0&logScale=1&per100K=1&startDate=2020-09-01&values=cases
Also I looked at some leading indicator curves, r[t] and % positive, and they both seem to be turning. [Many here have ridiculed me for using those, but they can be helpful.] I think the increase in cases is stopping. When it will turn downward is uncertain.
As Churchill said “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.â€
On a personal note another granddaughter [age 9] and my son have tested positive. They have only mild symptoms, are fully vaxxed and are both quite fit, so we are hopeful that this will only be an inconvenience.
SteveF,
And here is some of the noise about HRC (or HtB) running in 2024:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-2024-comeback-president-biden-harris-democrat-nominee-race-2022-midterm-loss-11641914951?st=6dvdu5gj8a4ys76&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The only thing that can explain this idiocy is pure desperation. Comparing her to Nixon, who lost to JFK in an election that was likely stolen by the Democrat machines in TX and IL, followed by losing the election for Governor of CA and then being nominated for President and winning two terms is not particularly relevant. Nixon was 56 when he was inaugurated as President, 21 years younger than Hillary would be in 2025. Nixon lost to JFK in 1960. I think JFK was a terrible President, but many people think he walked on water and he was a pretty good campaigner. HRC lost to DJT. Enough said.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208544): “The only thing that can explain this idiocy is pure desperation.”
.
Indeed. But who are the other contenders? A senile old man, an incompetent VP, a clueless Secretary of Transportation, and the Pretender to the Governorship of Georgia. Crooked Hillary fits right in. Heck, with that bunch All Out Crazy might have a chance.
.
p.s. – I’d like to take credit for All Out Crazy, but I stole it from Curtis Sliwa.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-react-inflation-expected-to-cool-this-year-11642025640
.
“The U.S. inflation report for December showed prices accelerating at the fastest pace in almost 40 years. But history isn’t much of a guide in this case, economists say, because today’s inflation is caused primarily by factors related to the Covid-19 pandemic and should fade in the coming months.”
.
Why would I possibly be skeptical about this? Is it because I don’t trust science? Is it because my partisan block is so deranged I can’t accept the word of unnamed experts? Eventually inflation will decline, but I think all credibility has been lost here.
Tom Scharf,
A somewhat clever way to say ‘but this time it’s different.’ Except it almost never is different.
“Is it because I don’t trust science?” Or because the “science” component in economics is extremely hard, and economists making prognostications are not guided by models capable of making such guesses? Personally, I don’t know. My brief dips into theories behind economic forecasting just made me glad I wasnt trying to do it.
.
But seriously, dont trust science? Do you have a better way to form accurate beliefs about reality?
Science tells me not to trust forecasts from people who have poor track records. Science tells me the best way to trust models of the future is verification and validation.
.
But it’s pretty hard to model things when you don’t know the future, ha ha. There are a lot of moving parts here.
.
Economic forecasting lately is 10% science and 90% politics. Queue up the endless prognostications of how the economy would fare under a 2016 Trump administration. Even for the earnest ones unless there is something very obvious going on then they are pretty much monkeys throwing darts. It isn’t that they are occasionally wrong, it is the confidence they portray after being repeatedly wrong and the fact that the media credulously gives them a platform over and over without asking tough questions about their past performance. These particular forecasts just aren’t very valuable, as are which way the markets will go next year.
.
I’m not saying inflation will continue to get worse 1970’s style, I’m just saying they don’t know either.
@Phil:
“But seriously, dont trust science? Do you have a better way to form accurate beliefs about reality?”
Seriously dude, you shouldn’t be on the internet if you’re that incapable of detecting sarcasm or irony.
Edit to add: I’m happy to eat crow if my own detector failed me here.
“Economic forecasting lately is 10% science and 90% politics”
.
Boy, that is a generous estimate for science. I would give it 5%. I’d say monetarist controls have improved since 70’s, but I also agree that that the pundits don’t know.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208551): “I’d say monetarist controls have improved since 70’s, but I also agree that that the pundits don’t know.”
.
For sure the pundits don’t know. But I question whether the experts know what they are doing. It is not like they have not been spectacularly wrong before. Many of the discredited ideas from the 70’s have been making a comeback. In particular, they have been trying to compensate for supply side shocks with monetary stimulus. Fortunately, it looks like the Fed has decided to stop going along.
Another totally unscientific post containing no statistics…. but interesting to peruse! Read the responses to: Ashley The Blonde RN, question “Roll call—What state are you in and what’s your current hospital capacity?†…learned about ‘proning’ covid patients for example
https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1481054253460373508?s=20
SC strikes OSHA vaccine mandate. Allows Medicare/medicaid to stand.
Split decision from SC. Healthcare vaccine mandates are a go, large employer vaccine mandates are blocked.
.
A reasonable outcome I think. I’m not against vaccine mandates in a pandemic, we could argue how (in)effective this one is right now with omicron, etc. I am however against the “workaround†of doing this through OSHA and setting a rather significant precedent where a lot of administrative wishes could be forced upon the population through federal emergency regulatory action.
.
States and private companies can still mandate vaccines. I listened to the two hour oral arguments a couple days ago, the conservatives were mostly working on a “who gets to decide†line of thinking, and they were skeptical of OSHA being that agency to do it. The liberals were rather angry for the most part that this was even in question during a pandemic. The government’s lawyer actually did a pretty good job of defending OSHA’s actions as legal, she declared that Congress had already acted on this question when it gave OSHA the authority it has. It was a bit of stretch there (aka cramming elephants into mouseholes) as this authority was generally used for workplace specific threats.
.
It was going to be a close call. Ultimately I think the issue at hand was such a large imposition on personal liberty that the conservatives want Congress to be more clear on intent. This is similar to the greenhouse gas ruling of the Clean Air act. Vagueness of delegated authority being argued over.
.
It was brought up that Congress has had two years to act and has chosen to not do so. It was also brought up that nobody tried very hard to take the route to get explicit authority from Congress before issuing a regulatory ruling.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?516919-1/supreme-court-oral-argument-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-health-care-workers
The OSHA decision was 6-3; as good a result as could be hoped for.
What was the vote on the Medicare mandate? What was the rationale that they have that power?
———
Ah, I see that the Medicare vote was 5-4. Roberts and Kavanaugh changed sides. One of those does not surprise me.
Cue progressives to start proposing packing the SC again? I think they know they can’t, talking about this idea would be pointless.
5-4 on Medicare mandate. Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the liberals. This was a decision based on who has the power, not sure on the separate arguments for Medicare and OSHA. I believe there are many more precedents for federal regulation of disease control and prevention in hospitals. The Medicare question wasn’t really talked about very much, it was almost entirely about OSHA.
“Cue progressives to start proposing packing the SC again? ”
.
Of course, this happens every time something happens they disagree with. Pack the courts! End the filibuster! We are the defenders against authoritarianism! Ha ha.
Packing courts is what people like Chavez do. It is hardly a move to defend democracy as most people understand the term. It is designed to allow the creation of a tyranny. The old phrase about electing a socialist government was one man, one vote, once.
DeWitt,
Heh. I hadn’t heard that one before, thanks.
I saw an article about how the chickenpox vaccine may have temporarily increased the incidence of shingles (Herpes Zoster) by a lack of boosting immunity to Varicella Zoster Virus from low level exposure.
I wonder if this logic also applies to COVID-19. I postulate that vaccinated individuals and individuals with acquired immunity, whether also vaccinated or not, shouldn’t wear masks and otherwise try to avoid exposure so as to maintain a higher immunity level. This would not necessarily apply to those with seriously compromised immune systems.
Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath waiting for someone to actually study this, and especially not the CDC.
The split decision was expected by many observers. I am a little surprised it was Kavanaugh that switched sides to preserve the Medicare/Medicaid vaccine mandate. I had expected it to be Barrett or Gorsuch.
.
That said, Gorsuch has been focusing on the “major questions/Chevron deference” issue for a while, so maybe his sticking with the non-mandate position was not much of a surprise. A bigger question than vaccine mandates is if there will be 5 votes on the court to rein in the over-reach of the EPA on greenhouse gas emissions. Congress absolutely never would have gone along with CO2 restrictions at any time since the Clean Air Act was passed; they have had 20+ years to pass legislation and have not. Everyone on the Court knows that. The EPA’s CO2 restrictions are comparable to the OSHA mandate, but writ large in terms of economic destruction.
.
I predict that issue will be addressed by the Court in the next year or two..
Steve wrote: “The old phrase about electing a socialist government was one man, one vote, once.”
.
I heard it was you could vote your way in but would have to shoot your way out.
DaveJR,
The statement is obviously true, but not mine.
In many states vaccine mandates for private employers are unlikely, even if allowed by law. In Florida, state law says:
.
1) Employees can choose from numerous exemptions, including health or religious concerns, pregnancy or anticipated future pregnancy, and past recovery from COVID-19.
.
2) Employees can choose to opt for periodic testing or personal protective equipment (PPE) as an exemption
.
3) Employers must cover the costs of testing and PPE exemptions for employees
.
Very few private employers will pay for constant PPE and testing. So vaccine mandates are effectively over in Florida, as well as many other red states; Biden’s idiocy has limited influence. When people start getting fired in blue states for refusing the vaccines, it will only ensure the crazy Dems are out of power in Congress come November. I look forward to the House impeachment hearings against Biden for his blatant corruption.
Dewitt -” chickenpox vaccine may have temporarily increased the incidence of shingles (Herpes Zoster) ”
.
I find this puzzling. AFAIK, chickenpox and shingle are the same virus. If you haven’t had chickenpox, then you can cant get shingles. You cant catch shingles so I cannot figure out the mechanism?? Is it postulated that lack of repeated exposure to the virus causes the immune response to wane to point where the virus is able to reactivate?
.
Hmm. Did some digging. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4928389/
“We found no evidence of an impact of varicella vaccination on the incidence of HZ. Our findings are consistent with other shorter-term studies examining the trend during the pre- and post-era of varicella vaccination in the United States, Canada, and Taiwan [8, 9, 13, 16, 26]. In a recent study of older adults (≥65 years) using Medicare claims data, age- and sex-standardized HZ incidence rates increased from 10.0 to 13.9 per 1000 PY in the 19 years between 1992 and 2010 without any evidence of change in the rate of increase after the introduction of the varicella vaccination program [8]. Additionally, prior studies have found that the increase occurred before the introduction of a national varicella vaccination program [7–9, 11–16]. However, our study is the first to provide a longer baseline and evidence of a longer and more robust trajectory of increasing HZ, further confirming the unlikely impact of decreased childhood varicella on a possible boosting immunity against VZV in adults “
.
Having had shingles twice, I have skin in this game (literally).
The SC is hearing EPA vs West Va. this term. It’s unclear whether they will consider throwing the whole endangerment finding out (major-questions doctrine), but there is a good chance the EPA will get a lot of clarification on what their limits actually are, which I think would be good for everyone one way or the other. The usual suspects are very nervous about this case:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-court-case-that-could-upend-efforts-to-protect-the-environment
.
“According to the major-questions doctrine, an agency can issue a regulation that would have significant political or economic ramifications only if it has explicit instructions from Congress to do so. Major questions is a challenge to the prevailing approach, known as the Chevron doctrine, which is named after a case—Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council—that was decided by the Supreme Court in 1984. Chevron holds that, if a statute is silent or ambiguous on a point, the courts should defer to an executive agency’s interpretation, as long as the interpretation is reasonable.”
It is theorized that some people’s apparent immunity to the flu is based on repeated seasonal exposure that recharges your immunity. If you don’t get this exposure your immunity will wane enough that a real flu infection is more likely. This is more theory than evidence as far as I can tell.
I’ve not posted here for some while but dip in now & then. I just followed Russell’s post #208553 and read some of the tweets by health professionals.
May I offer my best wishes to all and some morale boost from the UK.
I can confirm that our current spike of infections is rapidly falling off (7 day rolling average down 300k/24%) but our death rate is spiking upwards (7dra up 734/67% or 2/100,000).
We have ̶s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ lies for the whole country down to postcode (Zip Code) level available here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
My local ward has an infection rate of 2240/100,000 with 1st dose/2nd/booster of 87%/81%/64%.
Total covid deaths (on death certificate) are approaching 150k in 21 months, for comparison excess winter (Dec-Feb) mortality runs at around 25k with spikes of 40k in a bad/cold winter.
What do you call a thousand politicians at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean…
A good start
Tom Scharf,
“Chevron holds that, if a statute is silent or ambiguous on a point, the courts should defer to an executive agency’s interpretation, as long as the interpretation is reasonables.”
.
A fair summary of an absolutely garbage SC decision. The EPA (and other agencies) have used the Cheveron deference to promulgate regulations that are utterly disconnected from the intent of Congress in passing the laws those regulations stand on. Since Chevron, many regulations have amounted to little more than unchangeable fiat law issued by unaccountable bureaucrats…. IOW, government without representation. Chevron needs to be reversed to preserve government where the passage of laws, and the consequences of those laws, are actually accountable to voters.
After flu and colds went to really low levels here, I saw headlines with speculation that would lead to really bad season as we opened again. However, it postulated that flu continues to evolve elsewhere whereas our immune response doesn’t. All seems rather speculative but we will see.
Yes, there has been some predictions of a super flu season once we stop doing whatever it is that is keeping the flu levels way down (masks, social distancing?). Definitely speculation, but this is a good test environment to actually find some things out that we couldn’t do before. It’s still a bit weird to me that we do not understand these things very well yet.
The counter argument is that we don’t want to have a voter referendum from clueless people every time the EPA wants to examine allowable benzyne levels in water. Regulatory agencies should get some latitude but clearly there needs to be limits.
.
Environmentalists have been relying almost exclusively on legal maneuvering to get their initiatives through lately (see sue and settle) and they are very good at it. Your donations are paying for lawyers. It’s not very surprising that this area is where the biggest overreaches are occurring. There does need to be a correction because I also think it is being abused.
.
As an aside, environmentalists have completely ruined nature documentaries, I can’t watch them anymore.
I read the SC per curium and dissenting opinions.
.
I admit it was a challenge to read the dissent in its entirety (nausea was a serious issue that made me skim a few parts).
.
I must conclude the the court’s three lefties are in fact either utter morons, or so blinded by their politics that they willfully endorse moronic public policy. According to the dissent, in a revoltingly typical argument, no exiting law, rule, or constitutional restriction ever applies today’s ’emergency du jour’. Fortunately, Breyer (like Pelosi and her house ‘leadership’ group) is likely to hold on until a Republican is elected president with a Republican Senate, after which the court will be 7-2 and there will be very few SC decisions which flout law, the constitution, and common sense. Hang in there Mr. Justice ‘living constitution’; don’t listen to those calling for your retirement.
Phil Scadden,
And I found a link that I should have posted that says exactly the opposite.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6015493/
Note that my link is based on a complex model.
Clearly, long term, the chickenpox vaccine is the way to go. But my point was that there was evidence, if a model parameter is evidence, that there was boosted immunity from exposure to VZV. So the question I have is whether the same could be true for SARS-CoV-2. I don’t know and I doubt we’ll find out anytime soon because the utility of non-physiological interventions has reached the level of dogma.
Edit: The publication date of your link is 2016 and mine is 2018, so this isn’t ‘settled’ science.
Tom Scharf,
“EPA wants to examine allowable benzyne levels in water.”
.
I am uncertain if you are serious or joking (and I assume you mean benzene).
.
Nobody is arguing that toxic materials should not be regulated…. that was the whole point of the clean air and clean water acts. But whether CO2 is 400 or 500 PPM in the air has NOTHING to do with toxicity. It has to do with a broad question of demonstrable costs and demonstrable benefits, both nationally and internationally. Any public policy regarding CO2 emissions ought to be subject to public approval/disapproval. Substituting the judgement of EPA bureaucrats (who I can tell you from personal experience are a bunch of wild-eyed green wing-nuts) for the judgement of elected representatives, is nothing short of a grotesque distortion of the intent of the law.
As I have said before, the SC wants nothing more than to have Congress settle the question of CO2 emissions. Given Congress’s lack of action either way the SC must decide to allow or stop the EPA from implementing very costly regulations with questionable benefits that are pretty clearly not in the Clean Air act nor obviously anticipated in my view. Effectively allowing the EPA to regulate the entire energy sector(!), picking winners and losers, seems way out of scope. The failure here is really Congress not giving any formal guidance and letting this drift in the wind for over a decade.
DeWitt – I would agree not settled science. Your paper you found is based on model results, calibrated for a single area and annoyingly doesn’t discuss the paper I found, which is based on comparison of incidence of shingles in countries with different timings for introduction of vaccine. Someone needs to reconcile results to make a convincing story.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208567)
Dewitt -†chickenpox vaccine may have temporarily increased the incidence of shingles (Herpes Zoster) â€
I find this puzzling. AFAIK, chickenpox and shingle are the same virus. If you haven’t had chickenpox, then you can cant get shingles.
You cant catch shingles so I cannot figure out the mechanism??
Is it postulated that lack of repeated exposure to the virus causes the immune response to wane to point where the virus is able to reactivate?”
–
I think there is a phenomenon where Shingles occurs more commonly seasonally when chicken pox cases occur in the community.
–
You do not catch Shingles.
The herpes zoster virus in the nerve cells is dormant and activated by stress, at any time at any age.
So if you are run down, on chemotherapy , have occult cancer or simply have the antibodies stirred up by either exposure to an antigen like a herpes zoster injection or infection it can trigger a flare up of viral growth in the nerve cells leading to the development of Shingles.
–
Hope that might explain it.
.
Shingles is a wonderful disease for medical scientists.
The usually one sided eruption of vesicles can help delineate where our sensory nerves run [dermatomes].
The ache and pain often come a few days before the diagnosis is evident.
The best treatment is two weeks of expensive antiviral treatment.
Doctors often treat for 1 week only but to reduce post herpetic neural pain which occurs in about 5% in a debilitating way for months or years a little bit of overkill [2 weeks treatment] is best.
Particularly if over 75.
Some doctors are reluctant to prescribe treatment if the rash has been present for > 48 hours. Find a different doctor if you are over 60 and get at least 1 week of antiviral into the system.
angech,
Yup, get the antiviral. I had a case of shingles about 5 years ago. The upper right quadrant pain started about 4 days before a rash, and quickly became intolerable….. impossible to sleep. I was diagnosed when a one-sided rash developed. 2 days of antiviral reduced the pain by a factor of 10. Seven days cost US$350, but worth every penny. Said the doctor who treated me: “You should have double-dosed ibuprofen for a couple of days to get some sleep.” Which I will remember should I ever get shingles again.
You can also combine ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Try staggering the doses if it’s causing stomach upset.
From Peggy Noonan: Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point
He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-reaches-break-point-georgia-speech-voting-rights-senate-mcconnell-division-election-law-11642110521
Russell Klier,
Biden’s Georgia speech is in the same vein as Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables.’ Let’s hope it does as much damage.
The irony of that column is that Peggy Noonan worked very hard at getting Biden elected as she was a charter member of the Never Trump club. As the Chinese curse goes: May you get everything you wish for.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208587) “Biden’s Georgia speech is in the same vein as Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables.’” I had exactly that same thought…but we need to find a catchy phrase in the speech so that it sticks.
Interesting discussion here about shingles and personal experiences with it.
I had shingles several years ago after being vaccinated for it. Probably one of the most painful experiences in my lengthy life. I did not sleep for two nights before going to the clinic for a diagnosis. I got a thorough examination and many tests with no diagnosis. Before testing I was asked if I needed a pain killer which I answered twice in the positive for two different levels of pain killer. I was then asked if I wanted to stop the pain immediately and I gave an emphatic yes. After that shot of pain killer, I went to sleep peacefully for two hours before the examinations resumed.
In two days I was back at the clinic with a blistery rash on my left lower back which was immediately diagnosed as shingles – as I was protesting with “but I was vaccinatedâ€. The pain greatly subsided with breakout of the rash. It took several weeks for the tingling and numbness to subside and I continue to have some skin sensitivities that have become as easy to deal with as other older age issues (I cannot complain). My father had shingles that required him to take nerve medications for the rest of his life.
My brother and sister also acquired shingles within a few years of my experience and all on the lower left back. My sister’s shingles experience was almost as bad as mine and my brothers was much less severe. We all had chicken pox in our youth at the same time.
I understand that the current shingles vaccination is 90% affective and, of course, that you can acquire shingles multiple times.
From a Democrat: [Today]
Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard
“Biden promised to unite our country. Instead he betrayed us, pouring fuel on the fire of divisiveness, tearing our country apart. Biden compares those who disagree with him to racists, traitors & enemies, & has his AG target Americans as domestic terrorists. Unfit to lead” https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1481928828238790657?s=20
I find these victories whereby that at least part of the Supreme Court sees the problem with regards to individual freedoms when declaring emergencies to facilitate mandating government restrictions that would otherwise not pass constitutional muster somewhat temporary unless there is a change in thinking on the part of the intelligentsia and the large portion of the voting public that follows that thinking.
A realistic view of this matter must acknowledge that agencies and unelected bureaucrats continue to wield great discretion over what government can do in controlling individuals and groups of individuals actions and that the bureaucrats can be influenced in their control by whatever is the current intelligentsia’s consensus on the matter. A deeper look into the matter must acknowledge that the intelligentsia as represented by academia and the main street media is in favor of the current administration of government power and would favor that power increasing – and by any means possible whether by a living constitution or packing the court with justices who are so inclined to that interpretation of the constitution.
An important question to ask is what portion of the current intelligentsia would favor the Supreme Court liberal justices over the so-called conservative justices. Another, as important question, is whether power grabs by parties that want to use the government’s power to obtain their ends should be looked upon by the sanitized picture we got from Civics 101 of an idealized government or as power grabs by any means.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208587): “Biden’s Georgia speech is in the same vein as Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables.’”
.
Much worse, IMO. Hillary put only half of Trump supporters in her basket. Biden lumped a majority of the population in with George Wallace and Jefferson Davis. And Biden was speaking as President, not as a candidate.
.
Tulsi Gabbard is one of a minority of lefties who have refused to drink the KoolAid. Along with Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley, Naomi Wolf, and a handful of others.
Biden’s puppet masters are so disconnected from reality that they could not detect Biden’s Atlanta speech was the purest of gaffs. The whole thing is full of clips for future attack ads. Standing up and saying “if you don’t agree with me you are a traitor” doesn’t ever go over well. Wanting voters to have to show an ID makes you like Jefferson Davis? Come on!
.
Republican’s are quite correctly going to say that this incompetent, addled madman needs to be blocked by Congress. And blocked he will be on January 2, 2023. It looks like a handful of Dems in the Senate can see where this is heading and won’t let Biden eliminate the filibuster…. so, until January the damage will be somewhat limited, though much will depend on if the federal courts are willing to block Biden’s many unlawful executive actions. I look forward to impeachment hearings over Biden’s blatant personal corruption, though I continue to think he may be forced out of office due to advancing dementia before Republicans take control of Congress.
SteveF wrote: “I continue to think he may be forced out of office due to advancing dementia before Republicans take control of Congress.”
.
Forced out, maybe, but possibly not due to advancing dementia. The “growing threat” of “domestic terrorism” has been a running theme. I expect this narrative is going to amp up in the months leading to midterms. The first charges of sedition have apparently been made (although it’s unclear whether they were waiting for 2022 or finally realized that an insurrection without anyone charged with insurrection looks silly). A special unit has been created to deal with it. Biden would make an excellent grand finale which would change everything.
Yes, I agree with Peggy Noonan’s take and she is usually not so strident. I have no idea what Biden was thinking here. It does increase my worry that he is losing it mentally. That was definitely an incoherent angry old man at the podium. The message of “pass federal voting laws only the Democrats support or you are a racist” is just not a winner. What was really weird is that Stacey Abrams and some other voting activists refused to attend. That type of message wasn’t enough for them to even be seen with Biden? Biden may have learned a lesson on trying to pacify progressive activists here, no payback. This is definitely another case of confusing Twitter with reality IMO.
.
Speeches like this will be forgotten quickly and the compliant media will bury this embarrassment. It nudges the meter for the not politically engaged against him though.
“A deeper look into the matter must acknowledge that the intelligentsia as represented by academia and the main street media is in favor of the current administration of government power and would favor that power increasing – and by any means possible whether by a living constitution or packing the court with justices who are so inclined to that interpretation of the constitution.â€
.
There was little doubt that the liberal justices weren’t very interested in what the limits to regulatory power were, it was just there was pandemic emergency (right), the vaccines were the best answer (right), and therefore clearly for the good of the country we should interpret the statutes to get this done (right?). Perhaps, but they just didn’t care about the details of personal liberty and legislated restriction of power. They just wanted to do what was “rightâ€. The ends justified the means.
.
These justices and much of academia et. al. see the government’s role as that of your parent. There to take action to help you and bend the rules if necessary for the general public good. The conservatives see the Constitution and limits of government power as necessary protection against abusive parents.
.
If only the liberals were the benevolent all knowing masters they believe themselves to be. The cognitive dissonance they display is incredible, they believe they should be given near limitless power in a defined “emergency†to control the behavior of the minions but simultaneously fret endlessly that the their political opponents are trying to do the same, but only with nefarious motives for immoral outcomes. See the tradeoff of ease of voting vs voting integrity.
.
One of the main reasons I voted for Trump was the SC. I do want the constitution to be somewhat rigidly adhered to. It is not a living document that can be interpreted on a party line for convenience. I do regret voting for Trump for some obvious reasons (as opposed to simply not voting), but not for this one. It was worth it.
I don’t regret voting for Trump, but I’m not voting for him again.
Shrug.
[Edit: He lost my support when he urged Pence to overturn the election results, and nothing I’ve seen since changes that.]
mark bofill,
As Dirty Harry said… “a man has to know his limitations.” Trump never did and still doesn’t, which is why he wasn’t re-elected. It is also why he can’t bring himself to let 2020 go.
.
But since a vote is not just against someone, but also for someone else, I will withhold judgement about voting for Trump if he is the candidate in 2024. If given a primary vote, I would vote for someone other than Trump for certain.
I voted for Rubio in the 2016 primary. We may very well get another situation where it is Trump versus a group of people who split the rest of the vote. The RNC needs to have a plan to thin the herd quickly somehow to overcome this. I’m not holding my breath.
.
The left will go to extremes to prevent Trump from running again which may be quite counterproductive to their efforts. You need to be an autocracy to prevent an imagined autocracy! Sad!
Tom Scharf: “The RNC needs to have a plan to thin the herd quickly…”
Akin to the DNC trying to avoid Sanders? It did the trick, but ending up with Biden is a rather hollow victory.
(I preferred Gabbard, but she garnered little support. Of the next group, Klobuchar.)
HarlodW,
“but ending up with Biden is a rather hollow victory”
.
Perhaps the understatement of the 21st century.
.
He is a toxic force from the land of Alzheimer’s dementia that constantly damages the social fabric. I thought Trump was divisive….. but Biden is, if anything, even worse…. and he promotes horrible, stupid policies to boot. My dad went through the “angry dementia” stage about 6 years before he died; that is where Biden is right now.
So I expect Biden will die from Alzheimer’s (or its many serious complications) in 6 to 8 years. Of course, he may last a little longer…. the very best medical care has its benefits, if you don’t mind sitting in your own urine and worse.
.
But really, how the guy was elected president remains an utter mystery to me. He is the most intellectually incompetent president of my lifetime, and worse than Jimmy Carter (an utter idiot himself) is a very low bar.
As predicted, the Florida seven day average case count is headed downward…. only slightly, but downward. The leading indicators are that this trend will continue. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases
The hospitalizations, and more importantly ICU cases, however are still in a steep incline. I have no predictions as to when these will level off.
The official Florida daily death count is still in decline, but this is a bogus number. Desantis changed the reporting system so that there is a 2-3 week delay in official death counts. Unofficial death counts have begun to rise [steeply]. “10. Weekly COVID-19 Deaths Based on Week Reported and Week of Occurrence†https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/
From Russel’s link it is kind of funny that Dade county has the highest vaccination rate 94% and the worst cumulative covid case rate and the worst case rate in the last week. 36% of residents have tested positive in Dade county according to the link. Yikes. That is a very large amount of existing natural and vaccinated immunity resulting in * by far * the worst case rate in the state. Omicron is quite the immunity evader. They are testing positive at a rate of 3% of the population a week.
.
I think everyone should get vaccinated to help prevent serious illness but the argument that vaccination helps stop the spread is looking weak right now. It may help some on the edges but it is clearly not effective in the way vaccine evangelists sometime represent it to be.
SteveF: “Perhaps the understatement of the 21st century.”
I appreciate the compliment (?) but the century is still young. 😉
Tom Scharf (Comment #208606)
You noticed the Dade County Covid anomalies. Dade County has some demographics that may explain this…. English is not the primary language in Dade County. It is the hub for tourists from all across Central and South America. There is a joke among Hispanic tourists there…. Dade County is a great vacation destination… the beaches, the night life, the culture AND it’s located very near to the United States.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208606)
I forgot to post the reference for the above comment:
https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/getmedia/004b3094-e2a5-49a0-bd64-d583c43546f8/Visitor_Industry_Overview_FY_2020.pdf.aspx#:~:text=The%20total%20number%20of%20visitors,nine%20months%20of%20the%20year.
Never Trumpers spend a lot of money in late 2015 attacking Rubio on behalf of Jeb Bush. There was a memo from a prominent Republican campaign person explaining how Jeb was the likely nominee.
MikeN,
If you are spending money, it’s probably a better strategy explaining why the candidate you like is good than trying to shoot down whoever you think is “second choice”. But the politically motivated do weird things.
.
If Trump runs and is still running when the Illinois primary comes around, I WILL vote and NOT FOR HIM. I’ll probably consider who the front runner is since at worst they would be the lesser of two evils. With luck, they might even be decent– but I absolutely won’t vote for Trump. I’d guess that will be true for lots of Republican primary voters.
If he gets the nomination, I won’t vote for him. (OTOH: I’ve voted 3rd party pretty consistently. So, that’s not much of a threat.)
The man does not belong in office.
Neither does Biden or a lot of other people. But Trump does not belong in office.
Lucia, with your thinking, their strategy makes sense. You don’t want to vote for Trump in the primary, so perhaps you vote for Rubio. However, if Jeb Bush is running stronger, then you would consider him instead.
So they spent a hundred million attacking Rubio to ‘clear the lane’ for Jeb.
It was also why all the calls for Kasich to drop out despite his insignificant vote totals.
Henry Olson wrote at the time of Kasich’s entry that it would hurt Jeb Bush, because about half of Republican primary voters label themselves moderate or liberal and the nominee tends to do well there and among the somewhat conservative.
I finally remembered the memo author was Mike Murphy.
MikeN,
Nobody in 2015 was going to stop Trump from getting the nomination. Not sure if that will be true in 2023. Trump still has astronomical negatives: only about 40% of voters view him positively… a year out of office and still worse than the utterly incompetent Biden!
.
Enough Republicans may recognize Trump is just about the only Republican who could lose to Kamala (or whoever the Dems nominate), and figure it better to support someone else in the primary. Much can happen between now and 2023, but one thing is certain: most voters don’t like Trump and never will, and many will never vote for him, no matter the consequences (such as a mentally incompetent person in office). I just don’t think Trump has a realistic chance of being elected in 2023. He will damage the country if he lets another incompetent lefty assume the presidency in 2024.
At least in Illinois voting Republican has meaning in the primary.
.
I wish Trump would just go away. I imagine many people on the left feel the same about Clinton. Could you imagine Trump vs Clinton again? There is no way I’m voting for Trump again. I never liked Trump’s childish behavior, but his policies were fine. I don’t think he really cared that much about them. Stop the Steal was the end for me.
If Russia invades Ukraine Biden is going to look weak which is going to add to his domestic troubles. He has already signaled he intends to do nothing about it. I suppose he will give a speech, one wonders if he will berate Putin as much as he does Republicans ha ha. Realistically now is the time for Putin to do this, the west is distracted with seven levels of naval gazing.
.
What to do about it? I don’t know. Probably best to have the CIA smuggle in advanced weaponry after the invasion and make the occupation very costly in lives to Russia. The Afghanistan plan. What? We have no idea where those unmarked advanced missiles are coming from … seems like a lot of Russian jets are crashing lately.
Trump can run as an independent and split the vote of the Republican base. That would be classic Trumpish behavior.
Lucia,
That’s essentially my position too.
NWS Alaska Region
@NWSAlaska
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption was heard here in Alaska starting around 3:30 a.m. – 6,000 miles from the volcano!
https://twitter.com/NWSAlaska/status/1482431322740060162?s=20
Incredible satellite video of the volcano erupting…
On Jan. 13, 2022, NOAA’s GOES West satellite captured an eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’api volcano in Tonga. (Image credit: NOAA GOES West) Scroll down for the good stuff.
https://www.space.com/tonga-volcano-eruption-satellite-photos
WHO DEY
Bengals 34, Raiders 21
Andrew
Andrew_KY (Comment #208621): “Bengals 34, Raiders 21”.
.
I have not paid attention to the NFL the last couple of years, so I find that score really surprising. The Raiders made the playoffs?
Andrew_KY
Caution Andrew, Big Ben ain’t dead yet! He may stay alive just long enough to poke the Who Deys in the eye one more time.
Russel,
The satellite video of the eruption is amazing!!
Three years to go. I do not get a vote.
Maybe a mid year win for theRepublicans.
Biden may not survive 3 years , in which case we may get President Pelosi.
Kamala will be disappeared.
Trump, Buttigeig or Marianne.
Lucia , sometimes you just have to vote for whom you will not vote for
angech (Comment #208625): “Lucia , sometimes you just have to vote for whom you will not vote for”.
.
Well said. Elections are not for self-indulgence. They are for making decisions. Sometimes the right decision is an unpleasant one.
Fools. Nobody ‘just has’ to vote for anybody in this country. A refusal to support a candidate needn’t have anything to do with self indulgence. [..striking the rest of my remark..]
Unless the idea is that the exercise of intelligence and [discrimination] now falls under the umbrella of self indulgence. That’s a notion worthy of a Marxist professor. That’s beneath you, I’d have thought.
angech,
Who is Marianne?
We were having a quiet evening at the farmlet we have temporarily moved to and then got these odd bangs. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is only 2000 km away…
.
Pressure sensors in UK picked it up too.
mark bofill (Comment #208628): “Unless the idea is that the exercise of intelligence and [discrimination] now falls under the umbrella of self indulgence.”
.
Strangely enough, it could be. If you vote for candidate B because you judge him to be better for the country than candidate A, fine. But if you think candidate A would be better for the country and refuse to vote for him because that would be beneath a person of your intelligence and discrimination, then that is self-indulgence.
Mike,
It could be. I don’t think it is in Lucia’s case or mine. People may disagree, this is fine. But it’s uncharitable and counterproductive in my opinion to assume that conservatives who don’t intend to vote for Trump again will do so on the basis of self indulgence. I ask you nicely not to do that.
.
[Edit: Steve, I guess Angech is referring to Marianne Williamson? I’m not sure.]
Mike,
It seems to me, and I certainly could be wrong, in which case do correct me, that you are arguing that people should vote for the candidate they believe will be ‘better’ by some standard than the other. I’m not sure I agree with this.
Take an easy if absurd example strictly for illustrative purposes – Stalin wins one party’s nomination, Mao wins the other. I honestly don’t see why I have any obligation to vote for either one, even if I can arrive at some reasonable conclusion that one is slightly better in some way than the other. Neither is acceptable. There could be value in not voting for either one. Not saying there necessarily [would] be value in not voting for either one, but it seems possible that [there] could be.
Shrug. I’m not looking for a fight, no profit in that.
mark,
If you are saying that you would prefer another Biden term to another Trump term, then fine. And that would prefer Harris to Trump and Hillary to Trump, etc. But it sounded to me like lucia was saying that she would prefer anyone to Trump, just because she is mad at Trump. Would Hunter Biden be better than Trump?
.
I can sure see saying that you hope that Trump is not on the ticket. And that if he were, you’d have to seriously consider voting for someone who would otherwise turn your stomach. I am objecting to the implication that the alternative is irrelevant. Or to voting third party because voting for either of the major party candidates in beneath you, as opposed to voting third party because that is the person that you actually want to win.
Mike M,
There is unfortunately, often a “lesser of evils” choice presented. I believe Trump is the most offensive, pretentious, puffed up fool to ever hold the presidency. But the policies he pursued (always vigorously resisted by the left) were mainly sensible and much better for the country than the policies offered by Hillary. (Not to mention that Hillary was menacingly dishonest, mind-boggling corrupt, and did not believe in personal liberty…. especially for the ‘deplorables’.) It was an ugly choice.
.
Biden did his best before the election to hide his policy views and his dementia, and tried as much to *not* offend voters as Trump tried *to* offend them; it was a winning strategy (just barely). The result has been destructive policies for the country. Trump is an awful candidate and a terrible person, but I always force myself to look at the alternative. I wish Trump would go away so that a more reasonable and electable candidate could get the nomination, but I fear that will not happen.
MikeM
.
If the upcoming election is Biden vs. Trump, I will vote for the 3rd party candidate. I consider that to be “making a decision”, and it is the opposite of “self indulgent”.
.
I know others will make different decisions.
.
But no one “has to” vote for Trump or Biden.
MikeM
Because I’m “mad” at him? Wow. He is a terrible choice for the nation, especially based on his behavior at the end of the term. That behavior continues. I will not vote for him. I also would not vote for Stalin or Mao. I”m not “mad” at them either.
.
There are many people I would not vote for.
Well, you’ve narrowed down the “reasons” one might have to vote 3rd party. There are lots of reasons to vote 3rd party. They may not sway you but the sway others.
I thought about this more…. and oh, the irony.
So, it would see, voting for one candidate (say Trump) who I “don’t actually want to win” not not be “self indulgent” but voting for another candidate who I “don’t actually want to wind” would be self indulgent! Hah!
.
I’m kinda guessing some sort of motivated reasoning is going on in the mind of someone who, well, kinda sorta likes Trump and is flailing around for reasons why someone “must” vote for Trump should he be nominated.
.
No one “has to” vote for Trump. Lots of people won’t. They don’t have to vote for him.
Thanks Lucia.
.
On the question of self indulgence, well. I live in Alabama, it is not a swing state. One can argue with some justice that most votes in such places make no practical difference at all. The probability is insanely high that my vote will not be among the handful that decide Alabama at any rate. So in that sense perhaps my vote is self indulgent.
Maybe other things can be accomplished by not choosing the lesser of two evils. I’m here arguing my case, maybe a reader or two will think about it and decide to draw lines of their own past which they will not support candidates regardless of who is the lesser evil. Maybe over the long haul this will improve the quality of primary nominations.
Unlikely.
Shrug.
mark,
In the election for president, Illinois is usually so BLUE that one vote doesn’t matter to that outcome. In contrast, a vote for the 3rd party helps that party to achieve the status of “established party” and thus facilitates 3rd parties from running.
.
When both the Dems and GOP nominate cr*ptastic candidates, I think people should look to supporting 3rd parties and helping them grow. Voting for the “least worst” GOP or DEM when that vote makes absolutely no difference to any outcome instead of doing something useful, is something I would deem somewhat “self indulgent”. I mean… what do you get out of it other than telling people, “I voted against the Joe or Donald” (which ever you think worse.) or “At least I supported ‘our side'”. “Give me some snaps!” That strikes me as self indulgent.
.
Though, I would ordinarily not throw “self-indulgent” around– but MikeM while trying to advance an argument for the behavior he would prefer. Presumably, he can think of some reason other than “talking up my choice” in bar as “why” he would vote for Trump or Biden when that vote makes zero difference” rather than casting one that makes a difference. But I’ve yet to hear it.
Lucia,
I read over the text of Biden’s Atlanta speech on voting rights, where he explicitly accused half the voters of being racists and traitors, no better than Jefferson Davis. I conclude that he is rapidly falling into an angry demented state, and poses a very real danger to the country. Every time Biden has faced an important policy choice he has chosen the most destructive possible path. I shutter to think of Biden facing a real crisis with real consequences, like China attacking Taiwan.
.
IMO, Biden is a danger far worse than Trump’s endless, pointless ranting about a stolen election…. exactly the kind of endless pointless ranting about Trump and Russia stealing the 2016 election that we listened to from Democrats for 4+ years, starting in November 2016. I can’t in good conscience not actively oppose Biden should he run again in 2024. Votes in Florida can make a difference. YMMV.
Steve,
I don’t have any issue with other people deciding on the lesser of two evils. My problem starts when people denigrate those who don’t decide to choose between the two.
SteveF (Comment #208635): “The result has been destructive policies for the country. Trump is an awful candidate and a terrible person, but I always force myself to look at the alternative. I wish Trump would go away so that a more reasonable and electable candidate could get the nomination, but I fear that will not happen.”
.
I am not nearly as down on Trump as you, but I agree that we would probably be better off if he left the field open for someone else, such as DeSantis. Refusing to weigh whether the alternative would be worse is what I referred to as “self-indulgent”. Maybe that was not the right term, but although I can come up with alternatives they would be at least as likely to cause offense.
MikeM
I don’t see anyone refusing to weigh which alternative is worse.
I don’t think my position is all that unreasonable. I supported Trump almost until the very end. This isn’t fake news – Trump genuinely wanted and expected Pence to reject the election results and throw the decision back to the States. I thought then (and I still think now) that this idea was so extremely bad that regardless of Trump’s precise reasoning that Trump shouldn’t hold office as a result.
Maybe I am wrong, I don’t think that matters. I might be wrong and there’s no problem with people who disagree with my view. I don’t think my position is crazy. If a candidate and party wants my support, they have to refrain from attempting to pull maneuvers like the one Trump wanted Pence to try that (IMO) could be highly damaging to our country over the long haul.
Obviously, I realize that Biden is a disaster. I won’t vote for him. I’m not voting for Trump either. IMO we ought to do better than that. That’s all.
I am in essential agreement with what Lucia has posted here concerning third party candidates and my stated reasons are as follows:
1. I blame the self-imposed restriction to two party voting for the selection of deficient candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Both of these candidates besides having obvious mental deficiencies are mostly without guiding principles in their governance. Trump is in the game for advancement of himself, as any self-respecting egomaniac would be expected to be, and the fact that some of his policies are inline with reasonable voters on the right is because those policies coincidentally coincided with his self-aggrandizement. Joe Biden has never been a deep thinker on principles and thus has had to follow ideas thrown at him by others and preferably those in his own party by those more prone to throw ideas about (in the recent case, the progressives). Biden and Trump are not guided by any principles even when compared to the principle-lite approach of most politicians but rather what they shallowly think is best for them.
2. Both Biden and Trump use to even more extremes the typical two-party exchanges which instead of adhering to ideas and principles tend mostly to great and emotional exaggerations of the opposition as persons without addressing any ideas that might actually be involved. The recent speech by Biden on voting procedures and Trump’s speeches on immigration and stolen elections are examples of these extreme exaggerations.
3. If the voting public, which tends in the two-party system to vote against politicians and not for them, were polled with questions that fit separately with multiple party positions without identifying those parties I would expect to see a much higher percentages favorable to third party positions than that resulting from voting.
4. If we had multiple parties reflecting the differing views of the voting public, the two party proponents will argue that that might prevent government getting “things doneâ€. And to this I would say is not necessarily a bad situation given the tendency of governments getting things wrong.
5. Since the current voting systems are inherently favorable to the two parties, I, like Lucia, favor seeing more third parties on the ballot – even though that in my view is only a small step in the direction of having a multiple party system.
Be alert… The 12 noon models are out and the Eastern part of the country is in for 24 hours of dangerous weather… including snow, ice, tornadoes and hurricane force winds… Triangle of Florida to Ohio to Maine https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/map/
Russell, Yup. We have a tornado watch where I live in FL.
Russell,
I’m outside that triangle. 🙂
Nothing promotes alternative parties like having a proportional voting system of some form. Duverger’s Law. I imagine a Libertarian party would take off in USA if proportional voting was introduced. With FPP, voting for a 3rd party feels like a wasted vote.
https://youtu.be/IZjh1Y94vZo. Cool weather guy to watch during active weather events.
Phil,
Yes. Our voting system has us vote for people not parties though. I really wouldn’t be thrilled voting for “the party” and then having “the party” chose who makes it if they get 3,4,5 etc seats.
lucia (Comment #208653)
True what you say, but the party faithful’s and even not so faithful almost always vote for the party and not the individual running. The faithful make up a significant portion of the voters as they are more faithful in voting.
Kenneth,
I’m not “party faithful”. I consider specific candidates.
I think who is running matters to swing voters.
You can not use proportional voting for President. Nor the Senate or for Congress in the many states that have just one or a few seats.
.
Proportional voting can give enormous power to very minor parties (Israel) and can be destabilizing.
.
People should vote for individuals and many, if not most, would like to. Until recently I voted for individuals and I hope I live to see the day when that is again possible. But the parties demand loyalty from their elected officials, so in effect we usually don’t have the option of voting for an individual. Whoever gets elected will almost certainly be a slave to his party.
MikeM
I can still not vote for “Donald Trump”. I’m not put in the position of voting “Republican” and hoping they pick someone I don’t dislike.
.
The same holds on the DEM side.
.
It may be true that some people pick what vote to cast based on party. But we don’t vote for “the party” and allow “the party” to pick who fills the slot afterwards.
.
If a party nominates someone I don’t support, I don’t vote for that person. And with our system we do know who the person we are voting for is. It’s not just “some member of the party”.
You guys might prefer voting for the candidate, but there is much evidence for a large portion of straight ticket voting and more for Democrats who are minorities.
Sure, I vote Republican by default when I have no clue who some of the people are in some local elections, I don’t mind admitting that.
There are many different proportion voting system (or semi-proportion system). All with their own problems and advantages, just like FPP. Any kind of coalition government is prone to having the “tail waggomg the dog” though. We had it with previous parliament – the voters responded in next election by annihilating the offending party. To my mind, Israel’s problem is that bar for entry to their house of representatives is too low (3.5%). Problems in Israel are invariably cited when anyone calls for bar to be lowered here. It also help if major parties don’t hate each other and so are able to block the would-be controlling party when it counts (Germans are good at this). The disadvantages of multiparty governments have to weighed against the disadvantages of FPP. I think voter satisfaction with government is higher in countries with proportional/preferential electoral systems.
mark bofill (Comment #208660)
Mark, I was glad to hear that admission as I was not looking forward to having to beat it out of you. Truth be known, I suspect a large number of people do that kind of voting. If someone says that never happens and they know all the candidates, I would guess that they are either liars or do not have a life.
I will never vote for a Democrat because it has been my experience that they are very likely to have the more statist political stance – either by admission or deception. That does not mean I will vote for the Republican, because they can have very statist tendencies – again by admission or deception.
~grins~
Thank you, Kenneth.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208661)
In my book that is never a good thing. I think it might be better to say that they are more satisfied with their capability to vote for a party closer to their political philosophy and avoid the lesser of two evil choices.
I would never use Germany as an example for governing. They like being governed too much.
Kenneth, I would be very surprised if you thought there was no need for government at all, though I would expect you to in favour of minimal government. Given that government is a necessary evil then being satisfied with “they are more satisfied with their capability to vote for a party closer to their political philosophy and avoid the lesser of two evil choices” is a good thing. You could vote for minimal government.
.
I also think that Germans social dem tendencies has little bearing on the ability of their major parties to focus on their common goals so as to exclude smaller parties pushing policy they dont like. Germany is far the only multi-party government to have had grand coalitions in postwar times. Netherlands, Japan and Iceland all spring to mind.
Stalin vs Mao-
Home Simpson “Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos,”
MikeN,
Homer made the better choice.
.
It’s pretty impossible to think voting for Mao or Stalin would have been better that voting for Kodos.
.
At least if enough people had voted for Kodos, then neither Mao or Stalin would be in charge.
Phil, from a theoretical standpoint I favor Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism and for a practical matter I favor an effort to continuously reduce government as a living experience to show evidence that the private world can better handle matters that most of the intelligentsia and public currently think are solely in the government sphere.
As a practical matter and being realistic about the current world political situation, I see the developments going in the opposite direction from my preference described above. The living experience – perhaps better called experiments – with more government control over private matters has gained popular favor by way of the seeming contradiction that when a government program fails or has major problems the answer is more government control and expenditure. Following this thinking it does not take long for a very authoritarian government to arise. Even so-called democratic influence over government soon is opted by unelected bureaucrats and their agencies. Even the non-intellectual public can eventually be convinced that since the growing power of government is based on the idea that individuals are not sufficiently informed to make decisions now made by government agencies for them how can they be sufficiently informed to make voting decisions.
As another practical matter you touched on about the German governing system, I believe a smaller party can and does wield great power in Germany and that being the Green party. Merkel needed the Greens to form a coalition and conditioned on that was invoking energy policy that is costing Germany dearly this winter and in warmer times. The beauty of government mistakes like this one is to never have to say you are sorry or undo what was done.
“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results†Albert Einstein [maybe]
This discussion of fixing the broken American system of government by using voting in elections fits the above definition of insanity. Voting over and over again is what produced this broken system.
Kenneth,
“Following this thinking it does not take long for a very authoritarian government to arise.”
.
Sure, and it is no coincidence that most of humanity over most of history have lived under authoritarian government. I think the American experiment is unique in that those who founded the country recognized multiple threats of authoritarian government… including the tyranny of the majority. That recognition is an affront to wannabe tyrants on the left, and is why they consistently attack and try to undermine the structure of our government, by most any means available, and attack and do their best to silence anyone who speaks for personal liberty. Much individual liberty has already been lost to the “progressive” onslaught from the left, and I do not know if remaining individual liberty will survive much longer. I hope liberty survives, but I fear it will not.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi … That is the line of succession to the President of the United States. Our system of elections has elevated these three people to the apex of authority. These three people are both radical in their political views and incompetent in the execution thereof. This system is broken.
I don’t know about that Russell. I speculate sometimes that the characteristics of our leaders reflects some larger malady of our culture. On a massive scale, people believe to some extent or another in utter rubbish, and we choose political leaders accordingly. I don’t know that a system exists that spins straw into gold, so I don’t know that I believe the system is the problem. Could be though.
Just speculation I wouldn’t care to have to defend.
People in the governing class tend to believe that the general public should get less power to control their own lives. There doesn’t seem to be many libertarians inside the DC beltway.
.
One can certainly examine the “general public” and their many obvious deficiencies and see why many believe that. What they fail to see is that many people would rather control their own lives versus having marginally superior outcomes that are force fed to them by self righteous jerks. You can see how the beltway crowd reacts when they think others might start telling them what to do, it’s a danger to democracy. One of the best parts of the US governing system is the restraint on federal power which I think many outside the US don’t really see. There is very little doubt that this power would be much higher if left to bureaucrats, it’s just natural, people will give themselves more power if given the choice.
.
I think most people are one or two issue voters. Whether it is guns, free speech, abortion, taxes, etc. if you feel strongly about something then voting becomes rather easy with a two party system. The left’s views on free speech and liberty are bad enough for me that it precludes me voting for them. I could see voting for Manchin perhaps as he pushes back against the parts of the left that I find most distasteful, but realistically it is Republican or 3rd party.
.
Voting 3rd party to me is like wasting a vote though, it’s the same as not voting in the US. Any effective 3rd party ends up splitting the vote of one of the parties and that causes problems and ends up not reflecting the will of the people. For the most part I favor a split government that can’t get things done unless they are really needed. Big fan of the “low pass filter” filibuster. A hyperactive government run by an army of activists is a nightmare for me.
Kenneth, “Merkel needed the Greens to form a coalition and conditioned on that was invoking energy policy that is costing Germany dearly this winter and in warmer times. ”
.
This rans very much against my memory of events. I dont believe Merkel (CDU) have ever been in coalition with greens (SPD has/is) and she (sensibly) has been for phasing out coal before phasing out nuclear. Merkel’s decision to speed up phasing out of nuclear after Fukushima simply reflected public opinion – isnt that what democracy is supposed to do? Something like 80% of parliament voting for phasing out so I dont think you can argue for undue influence of greens.
.
But I do reiterate that undue influence of small parties is a problem in any multi-party government no matter how it is elected. With governments, you choose what kind of evils are best to live with. NZ moved from FPP to MMP in 1993. I, (along with large majority of NZers according to polls), believe this has been a positive change.
.
Russell, “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over…”. Has the US ever changed its voting system?
“One of the best parts of the US governing system is the restraint on federal power which I think many outside the US don’t really see.”
.
That is an interesting comment. There are not many federal systems in the world and all democratic ones seems to have a fair bit of tension between federal and state. As someone who thinks local is usually best, restraints on federal power sounds good.
Here is a study on excess deaths in the US:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29503
The author points out that some prior students used an estimate of expected deaths that was lower than deaths in recent years. That results in a high estimate of excess deaths. The author finds excess deaths about 20% higher than official covid deaths, which superficially agrees with the Financial Times ratio. However, this study only covers March 2020 through Feb. 2021. From what I have seen, the difference between excess and covid deaths was quite a bit higher in 2020 than 2021.
.
What I found most interesting was the age distribution. From the paper’s Table 3, here are the percent of excess deaths due to covid and number of non-covid excess deaths for different age groups:
_Age_ COV #non-COV
00-24 15% 6.7K
25-44 33% 26.4K
45-64 73% 34.1K
65 up 96% 17.9K
.
This clearly shows that the excess deaths are not due to under counting covid deaths since that would be most likely with older people. I think it quite possible that years of life lost have been greater for excess non-covid deaths than for covid deaths.
More interesting data on Tonga
https://youtu.be/zoMRwyNhqJ4
Phil Scadden (Comment #208677)
Phil, I misspoke about the CDU and Green coalition. I should have said that Merkel thought her party might need the Greens in the future. Actually the state of Baden-Württemberg had a coalition of the CDU and Green party in 2021. The Green party has a significant number of seats in the current Bundestag and is part of the ruling coalition with SPD.
Merkel’s sudden change of heart to close the nuclear plants earlier than planned was politically driven by her reaction to the Greens who had in fact won state elections in coalition with the SPD.
You are correct about the German population being adverse to nuclear power. I doubt the German governments will admit mistakes, but I wonder if the German people might. Maybe they are more like the anti-vaxxers and those opposed to GMOs. I believe it was pointed out to the politicians and the public that shutting down the nuclear plants could increase CO2 emissions. The counter argument was that the action would accelerate the move to wind, solar and renewables. It is called an experiment and one that involves testing how much a population will endure in order to get to carbon neutral. I believe that the German population might not be typical of the rest of the world in this matter, but nonetheless an interesting experiment.
Kenneth, I think the Germans are out of their minds shutting down nuclear – I prefer Merkel’s position. However, to believe in democracy is to bow to the will of the majority of the people. If it is a bad decision, then the majority need to be convinced of that. The alternative would rule by technocrats “who know best”. That is very unappealing. I think democracy does work best when dealing with issues rather than personalities. I much admire the swiss direct democracy. The debates surrounding referenda here (may we have many more) have been far more interesting and intelligent than the normal stuff of party politics.
Phill, lots of chatter from many on the need to make democratic adjustments in the US Constitution to allow for the will of the majority. Many specifically refer to the “unbalance†in the US Senate.
.
The biggest misconception with many people is the idea that the US is a democracy, when in fact it is a republic of individual and sovereign states. The framers of the US Constitution very specifically rejected “democracyâ€, liking it to mob rule.
.
The framers went to great lengths to protect the states from the “tyranny of the majorityâ€. This is why the State of Wyoming’s two senators have the same weight of representation in the Senate as do the two senators from the State of New York.
.
This right may not be changed under Article V of the US Constitution per:
.
“ Ratification [ of the constitution ] may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.â€
.
And
“ The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Governmentâ€
.
So in short, the US Constitution can not be amended to change the Senate balance between large states and small states that many have proposed. It’s not democratic, but that’s the entire point.
The Democrat Party equivalent in Australia is the Australian Labour Party.
Which I have voted for for 50 years initially because of policy , then to help bolster it’s pitiful presence in my Rural area and finally out of contrariness and cussedness.
One exception only a few years back when they went too Green.
–
Initially I was in favor of medicare, helping the disadvantaged, reducing the effect of religion in politics and an equal playing field for education.
–
I prefer as much freedom of speech as practical and possible.
This extends to women being able to have a choice about their bodies. I prefer people to have a choice in their workplace and work.
–
How to marry these views?
–
Perhaps the best view is that no matter whom you vote for you elect a politician.
You survive your 4, 8 or 12 years until a change comes.
You hope that when difficult people get into Government that the structure around them is strong enough to overcome their personal deficiencies.
–
Ed, I fully accept that you cannot have federation of states unless each state has equal weight. That for your senate. Your lower house? I thought that was population based? While you may fear the tyranny of majority however, I very much fear the tyranny of minority. If the US moved towards proportional representation, I would expect that to at least start with State government. More power to them, less to federal while you are at it.
Phil Scadden,
‘tyranny of the minority’
.
In the USA, this is really not much of a threat. Conservative rarely want to impose their policies on liberal bastions like California and New York. The opposite is the case: the liberal bastions want to impose their preferred policies everywhere. One small example. California consumes about 20% of all pork produced in the USA, but produces less than 1%. California has passed a state law which prohibits the production or *sale* of pork in California unless that pork is legally certified by the seller to have been produced under conditions the California legislature deems ‘humane’ (massively increasing production costs). Isolated production and distribution of pork which satisfies California regulations, produced everywhere in the USA, is an economic and logistic nightmare, and virtually impossible….. something the California legislature knows and is counting on. The intent is clear: California wants to impose on the the entire country a set of farm regulations that will drastically increase the cost of pork everywhere. This is no isolated case… California has done the same with auto emissions and safety regulations in the past, essentially forcing California law on the rest of the country. California tried the same thing with any product containing a material that ‘California determined might be a carcinogen’….. but fortunately that was mostly gotten around with simple label requirements, and California was not allow to block sales of said products. In the pork regulation case, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case by pork producing states against the California law. With the current composition of the court, there is a good chance California’s regulation will be blocked, because the constitution does not allow states to act in restraint of interstate trade.
.
The framers of the Constitution did not fear small states imposing their will on large states, but exactly the opposite. California proves their wisdom.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208686): “While you may fear the tyranny of majority however, I very much fear the tyranny of minority.”
.
As long as the American republic is functioning properly, there is no danger of tyranny of the minority. But there is a very real danger of tyranny of the majority. The U.S.Constitution is designed to minimize that danger. Checks and balances don’t just divide power between the three branches of the federal government, they also divide power between the states and federal government. Unfortunately, that latter safeguard has been greatly weakened.
.
Any danger of tyranny of the minority here comes from two sources. One is an oligarchy that has come to exercise far too much influence over the government. Fortunately, Trump came along to challenge that. The oligarchy might yet win, but it won’t be without a fight. The other danger is the courts, but that might just be another aspect of the oligarchy.
.
Parliamentary systems do not have nearly as much in the way of checks and balances. With first-past-the-post elections, a minority can easily win a majority of seats, then run roughshod over the majority. I suppose that is what Phil means with his concern about tyranny of the minority. In such a system, proportional representation might well provide a useful safeguard. But I think that in the American system, proportionate representation might well be counterproductive.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208683)
Phil, you keep throwing democracy into the discussion as if it were a politicians mother, flag and apple pie. You are certainly not alone in using this approach as it is a favorite of the modern day intelligentsia. Very authoritarian governments claim the democracy label and some even use it their nations name.
One can be against unelected bureaucratic rule through government and also a majority of voters imposing their will on others through, of course again, the government. In a truly free market economy it would be the consumer who decides what they can buy even when that choice may appear on the surface to be unreasonable. You do not need a majority of the population making that choice for you. The advantage of this is particularly evident in products aimed at a smaller portion of the public. Unhindered markets also react to changing consumer demands much faster than do failing government programs.
I should have added my own apple pie to the discussion in pointing to Joseph Schumpeter’s reference to capitalism’s creative destruction. I believe the truth of that statement is evident in everyday life while with most government programs, whether that government be authoritarian or more democratic or republican, just the opposite applies.
Omicron analysis- Death and Destruction, preliminary. This post assumes that Florida has just passed peak cases and those are almost exclusively Omicron cases.
Omicron seven day average case peak [71,000 new cases per day] is more than 3x higher than the previous variant [Delta] peak. This number is being suppressed by a testing bottleneck and the use of significant numbers of home test kits that are not being reported. I have no estimate of the amount of the undercount.
Current Adult Hospitalized Patients with Confirmed COVID-19 are 60% of the previous peak, but the count is still on a steep upward climb. Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak, but the trend is also still upward.
ICU confirmed covid adult patient history is on a 404 error but I do have the recent trend. ICU patients are up 6X over the minimum recorded the week of December 10, and the trend is steeply upward.
Deaths are either on a downward trend, if you believe the official State of Florida numbers, or on a steep upward trend, if you use the unofficial numbers. The official numbers have lagged behind the unofficial numbers by 2-3 weeks since Governor Desantis changed the reporting system about six months ago. It is too early to do any analysis.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases_currenthospitaladmissions
https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/currently-hospitalized
Florida hospitalizations due to omicron appear to have peaked, though the peak in intensive care bed use is probably a few days away: https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/floridas-daily-covid-19-hospitalizations-level-off-as-new-cases-decline/2661992/
.
Based on experience in other countries, the confirmed case fatality rate for omicron in Florida should be somewhere near 1:300. The actual case fatality rate (due to uncounted cases) will be lower… perhaps by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times. I will be surprised if deaths per day in Florida from omicron peak much above 125.
.
In the supermarket today, about 20% of people were wearing masks; nearly all of those were elderly.
SteveF (Comment #208692)
You wrote: “Florida hospitalizations due to omicron appear to have peakedâ€
This is based on a one day [Saturday!] pause in an upward curve. The TV news story you cited as a reference says “There are 11,568 inpatient beds in use for COVID-19 in Florida hospitals, a slight increase of 16 from the previous day, according to figures released Saturday by the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services.â€
If you look at the trend line the curve is decidedly upward: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_currenthospitaladmissions
To a layman like me, data from one Saturday seems like insufficient information to draw a conclusion about a long term trend.
The US government is a bit of a hybrid of everything. House is population based, Senate is state based. House and Senate must agree before it is sent to President who can veto. This can be overridden by 2/3 majority. President is voter count. Judicial is appointed federally, sometime elected in states. This has the net effect of slowing things down and requiring a lot of people to agree on big things before they happen. This is a good thing for a well functioning society in normal times, it keeps the constantly agitating extremists at bay and prevents small powerful groups from exerting too much power. It is also a good thing to give agitating extremists their say. It can be argued that this is a problem during times of emergency, but my claim is everything is an emergency to the agitating extremists.
.
The administrative state has a fair amount of power but not as much as most people think. They overreach routinely and are swatted back by the courts, either directly or by slowing implementations down long enough with legal challenges that a new administrator is elected to reverse things.
.
Changing the Constitution is so difficult (2/3 states, etc.) that it is unlikely to ever happen. The Constitution is there as a backbone against the tyranny of the majority. They can change some things but there are certain rights that cannot be touched no matter how many people agree. Just try legislating that all people with last names A-P don’t have to pay taxes. This has held up for over 200 years. Having cities dictate policy to rural areas is a bad plan. For example people who don’t own and need car are fine with heavy taxes on fossil fuels and transportation.
.
“Democracy”, shorthand for the US system, is holding up fine. The only people complaining are those who want to impose large societal change at an imagined 50.1%. Most of the time they don’t even have that (Manchin, Simena), but just live in an area and social circle where there is broad agreement on how * other people * should be ruled. They of course don’t need anyone telling them how to live.
FL cases looked to have peaked last week at about 3X the delta peak. The delta peak is the one I called the “last big one”, ha ha.
.
As suggested the underreport is likely higher this time. There will be a reporting blip for holiday yesterday. Hospitalizations should peak in a week or two, deaths a week or two after that. Deaths are just starting their upturn. Probably hit around 200 maybe (?), hard to tell. Clearly the mortality rate will be lower but this is really hard to predict.
.
The UK case decline looks just as steep as the incline, another good sign.
.
I would agree FL is pretty much moving on with omicron as they did with delta. There were more masks two weeks ago than recently, traffic is normal.
Illnois look down. Looks like a big crash in cases over the weekend and yesterday. I’m ignoring that for now. It could be a “Martin Luther King Holiday- reporting Lag”. So wait until Thursday to see if there is a “tons of people got sick on Tuesday” bubble.
Free Covid tests can now be ordered at:
https://www.covidtests.gov/
.
Opened a day early.
Thanks for the info, Tom. I just placed my order. I may not need them, but it is better to have them and not need them that to need them and not have them.
.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for them to come.
Thanks, Tom. I just ordered mine too.
Kenneth, ” In a truly free market economy it would be the consumer who decides what they can buy even when that choice may appear on the surface to be unreasonable.”
Consumers need to be able to make informed choices. Say if a consumer wants to buy pork that they are confident is free of trichinosis, then product needs labelling and some way to be confident that the label is correct. Ie effectively contract enforcement. Good luck doing that without some form of government.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208700): “Consumers need to be able to make informed choices. Say if a consumer wants to buy pork that they are confident is free of trichinosis, then product needs labelling and some way to be confident that the label is correct. Ie effectively contract enforcement. Good luck doing that without some form of government.”
.
We agree! Libertarians like to fantasize about a truly free market. But that would require that everyone have identical information and the time and expertise to be able to use it. Ain’t gonna happen.
Phil Scadden,
“pork that they are confident is free of trichinosis”
.
Please stop with the red herrings. Consumers in the USA already know they are not in danger of contracting trichinosis; this has been carefully controlled for many decades. Your comment is either 1) utterly uninformed or 2) utterly dishonest; you can tell us which it is.
.
The example I gave has zero to do with human health (tricinosis) and 100% to do with the legislature in California insisting that pigs everywhere in the USA, which happen to be produced 99% outside of California, should be given a California legislature specified “quality of life” before they are killed and eaten.
Liberal/left are so utterly dishonest. Their dishonesty seems to reside somewhere between horrifying and revolting.
To be fair to Phil, he was replying to Kenneth and the example fit the point.
Russell Klier (Comment #208691)
Omicron analysis- .
Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak, but the trend is also still upward.
I do not understand what you are trying to convey,
nor why you wish to convey in this way.
–
Using Pediatric Hospitalization stats in this way in a discussion about a disease that causes deaths in elderly people particularly and illness in older people would be best avoided.
–
“Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak,”
–
You could just say have doubled without using 100 as a figure.
Doubling nothing is nothing.
–
Doubling a rare outcome is still a rare outcome.
Why scare parents and children?
–
Many pediatric admissions are due to social reasons. If their parent is admitted to hospital they need to be looked after and if they have covid [but are not sick] No one wants to look after them other than hospitals .
Parental anxiety is a powerful driver of admission even when the child has covid but is unwell.
Putting them in hospital reduces the risks of grandparents catching Covid and dying.
–
The children who die with Covid , as with measles Mumps and the Flu, invariably have other health issues much more concerning than a mild cold, though it may tip those severe conditions over the edge.
Steve, how about “1) utterly uninformed”. This was spur of moment example to Kenneth on why I think you need government for some purposes and nothing to do with California. If you allowed retailers to sell what they liked, then nothing to stop them importing pork from whatever country, and then without labelling and necessary controls on labelling, your consumer cannot make informed decision. I cant really comment on your California issue. It seems analogous to international trade, when a country usually imposes standards on what goods can be imported (often as covert trade protection). Whether that is reasonable in a federation isnt something I have opinion on. The necessity of government (against Kenneth’s wishes) is something I do have an opinion on.
Phil,
We do have lots of labeling.
.
Oddly, if meat is raised in state, the USDA (department of agriculture) doesn’t inspect it and it doesn’t have a USDA label.) But I’ve never actually seen a “trichonosis free” indication on meat.
.
I think the USDA may have finally given up on regulating “French Dressing” (which no French Person would have recognized as “French”!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_dressing
Yes. American French dressing was a strange orangy-pink sort of concoction (likely found nowhere in France.)
We also had or have “Russian Dressing” which probably is unheard of in Russia.
Lucia – I dont doubt that USA does lots of labelling. (Aware of the many hoops our exporters jump through to get into the US market). My point was that regulation and enforcement of labelling is a valid government function so that consumers can make informed choices. I would bet that manufacturers of French dressing as still required to state ingredients on the label. Informed consumers is the necessary grease in a free market.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208706)
There are non-government agencies that could certify meat quality and, of course, there are market forces that keep meat producers in line and in fact those forces are currently at work. It is doubtful that any certifying operation could guarantee high product quality and safety without market forces operating. Turn meat producing over to government and maintain government certification and then see what happens.
There is a non government agency called United Laboratories that has been inspecting all kinds of products for over 100 years before placing their UL label on the product. It is recognized by the whole chain of making a product to selling it to the consumer and that includes governments. In my career I worked with UL and government agencies in the regulation/safety sphere and UL was much more diligent and hard nosed than government agencies. On the other hand, government agencies are good at finally acting after the horse has left the barn and the damage is done.
There is always the response that only government can handle certain functions and when there is a function failure the fall back position is: oh well, since only the government can do that job we will just have to carry on. It would have to be a very obvious failure by some individual(s) in the government before anyone would lose their job. Plus there is the likely outcome that any private party involved will get the blame.
angech (Comment #208705)
1. I wrote: “Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak,†and you responded :“You could just say have doubled without using 100 as a figure.â€
100% of the previous peak means that the current number of patients are equal to the previous maximum number of patients during the delta outbreak. It does not mean double. The maximum number for omicron has not yet been achieved but the numbers are increasing.
2.You also wrote: “Using Pediatric Hospitalization stats in this way in a discussion about a disease that causes deaths in elderly people particularly and illness in older people would be best avoided.â€
Since the onset of Omicron in South Africa children have been at the forefront of the data. Many sources are studying the increased effect on children. Reporting the status of children in the Florida omicron outbreak is both responsible and appropriate.
3.Stultus
So Kenneth, if I want to sell my dodgy product in an anarchy, then surely both my and UL shareholders would benefit from purely monetary transaction to get a UL certificate of approval? How are you going to privatize the court system?
.
I am rather used to governments contracting all the actual work to private industry but managing the contract fulfillment and quality control. In my opinion, any can be done by private industry should be but there are regulatory functions that you need government for.
And for an example. “Free range” eggs is unregulated here. You can call anything free range. So in steps industry to provide their own certification. Well and good. Except that multiple certificators and slack practice. Consumer organization try to alert public – but only public that pay for consumer organization publication (its private) get message. Finally, a law gets in the way suggesting our certificators shouldnt tell porkies and should check those that they certify. Without that law, not sure how the market would be. Still massive public mistrust and if I want free-range, I would get from supplier where I can see the hens, not something a lot of people are able to do.
Phil,
I agree labeling is a valid function for government. So is judging when disagreements arise over private contracts. There are valid government functions.
.
Labeling food can be funny in the US though. (In the EU too– they have all those regional disputes over names like Parmesan etc.)
.
Everything packaged has to list ingredients. It’s the restrictions and arguments about restrictions no names that are funny. One big argument right now is over things like “Almond Milk”. The (Cow) milk producers would like to be the only ones to use Milk. Similar things are happening with fake meat.
I should add that I am not in favour of government regulating free range eggs. I think the certification will eventually work, but the key to it working is the all-purpose consumer protection law we have and the legal apparatus that comes into play when breached, which of course depends on the existence of government.
This is related, but not exactly on point… At Christmas we had out-of-town family staying with us. I decided to smoke a standing rib roast for Christmas dinner. It takes all day and my son could help old dad tend the fire. A local farm market advertised “Premium Black Angus†standing rib roast at a reasonable price. It was pretty meat. I had never heard the grade “Premium†so I asked the guy behind the counter if it was “Prime or Choice”. He gave me a story that Black Angus is it’s own grade. I took my business elsewhere; I wanted prime Black Angus. I surmised the term “Premium†was a marketing gimmick and the beef was ungraded. This may not be important, but the store is owned by a lovely Mennonite family and they source many of their products from Mennonite farms.
Omnicron appears to be more infectious for toddlers. Wife works with toddlers and they have been back in person since the summer of 2020. They hadn’t had a positive case in the kids until two weeks ago. They are going symptomatic and testing positive where in previous waves they were really non-factors and only had to quarantine due to parents or older siblings testing positive. Wife now has 3 kids out of 13 out with positive tests right now. Another two had symptoms but tested negative a week ago. The teacher next door to her just tested positive.
Lucia, Phil Scadden
I read these two gems on Instagram this AM and had to pass them along…. I couldn’t help myself. “Time To Take The Warning Labels Off Everything And Let Stupidity Work Itself Out Of The Gene Poolâ€
And “What if ‘Soy Milk’ is just regular milk introducing itself in Spanishâ€
Phil, I am fully aware of the current situation whereby a large portion of the population sees certain functions as being exclusively in the realm of government and almost in the manner of the divine right of kings. If some, like myself, do not adhere to that thinking it is much easier for us to recognize the problems that arise from the coercive approach of government in these matters – even with good intentions – and conceptualize how the creative and adaptive features of human beings as applied non coercively could better preform the function.
Murray Rothbard has published some good accounts of alternatives to functions that are currently and overwhelmingly considered in the domain of government, but even he cannot comprehend all the creativeness that human beings could successfully apply.
Some of his books relevant to this discussion are:
The Anatomy of the Stata
Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market
For a New Liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
I do not necessarily agree with all of what Rothbard writes – as I do not always with a number of other libertarian writers.
A similar situation happens in the US for “farmer’s markets”. They are marketed as organic, pesticide free, local, etc. and there have been numerous exposés of how people just buy the leftovers from wholesalers after the super markets get their stuff and then sell that produce at farmer’s markets. It is unregulated and has been abused * everywhere *. You can likely find your own investigation locally.
.
Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYwB63YslbA&t=1109s
.
They track a seller getting wholesale produce, peeling off stickers, etc, ha ha. A red flag is that much produce isn’t even in season locally and people just don’t know. I personally saw a local market here selling stuff that had Sam’s boxes under the table, they are that lazy!
.
Buyer beware, but this eliminates the market for real local farmers and people want confidence that they are getting what is marketed. Unsurprisingly CA has started regulating the markets. People have to post exactly where they bought the stuff in their stalls and so forth, they have investigators, etc. Somebody has to pay for this, higher taxes, higher prices.
Angus beef generally has better marbling than most cattle breeds which means it is more likely to be graded prime, but there are Angus cuts that are graded choice. I suspect that the best marbling guarantee would be to purchase Wagyu beef.
High-grade wagyu can cost up to $200 per pound. The rarest steak in the world, olive wagyu, can cost anywhere from $120 to over $300 for a steak. I believe you can purchase beef from Wagyu raised in the US for around $100 per steak.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208719)
People are buying a brand as in : “Farmers Market”. I have seen the same thing in farmers markets with locally out of season produce. It is simple to ask the seller where the produce came from and any hesitation means no sale. I would not normally buy out of season produce at a farmers market.
Even locally grown produce can be a disappointment since locally grown is no guarantee of tasty. On the other hand, my local farmers market sells Jonathan apples early in the season that I cannot purchase in local stores that I would purchase if the price were considerably higher.
Russel
If I was really into meat, I’d ask around for other customers to find out the reputation of the product. If it’s from in state, it’s not going to be USDA anything because the USDA doesn’t inspect or certify it. But it could potentially be truly premium.
.
Of course, it would be better if the seller at the market knew that. Angus is obviously not a grade. But it is a variety of cattle known for being excellent meat.
My local farmers market is run as a coop and one of the rules is “nothing not grown or made by you” and only open to local producers. Breach the rules and you are out. Simple self regulation. However, sellers of meat, fish and baked goods will have to jumped through the food safety hoops first.
.
Kenneth – at first glance I would say Rothbard was dreamer and would be deeply suspicious of his model for human nature. Other bits… well, deeply repellent to my value system.
lucia (Comment #208722) “If it’s from in state†Florida doesn’t produce beef for the table. While cattle ranching produces 450,000 head a year, nearly all of it is shipped out as calves to be fattened up and butchered elsewhere. [Ship the cow to the grain, not the grain to the cow.] Also, there are very few Black Angus, they do poorly here because of the heat.
A personal note, Central Florida cattle ranches are often vast expenses of ‘unimproved pasture’. It is more like African jungle than Midwest pasture land. Roundups use aircraft, ATVs, dogs and horses. I have been on several. One rancher took my boys and I when they were in grade school. It was quite an adventure for two city kids. Lunch was cooked by an honest-to-goodness cowboy in an honest-to-goodness line shack. I expected John Wayne to ride in.
Finally, the US cattle industry started in Florida: “Ranching and Beef production have been central to Florida’s heritage for more than 400 years. The First Documented cattle to the state was in the 1500s, by the 1600s there were 34 ranches in Florida and 20,000 head of cattle.†https://www.floridabeef.org/raising-beef/cattle-in-florida
Here’s the latest fear porn article:
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-01-18/us-faces-wave-of-omicron-deaths-in-coming-weeks-models-say
So we’ll have up to 1.5 million hospitalized and 300,000 deaths in the next two months. Hah!
Meanwhile the NYT has an article on how omicron is in retreat.
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220119&instance_id=50672&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN®i_id=126975461&segment_id=80081&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F4c47d6e7-2c4e-5817-8183-3b2993c530bd&user_id=45d7af3e652caac1b2f2bbf03bdc0cbd
Interesting discussion we have had here concerning the government being an exclusive body in informing the consuming public. I would like to mention a couple of examples of how this has worked for the public and if I may be so bold as classifying the taxpayer as a consumer in a couple of more examples.
1. Student loans whereby the government was silent about the issue of how students should estimate how they would pay back their loans by considering the amount of the loans and the expected earning power the degree would provide.
2. Student loans whereby the taxpayer was told the government could make money on those loans.
3. Subprime Mortgages whereby the government encouraged these loans without attempting to inform those seeking these loans of the risk of the requirement to make payments and avoid foreclosure.
4. The Cost of Build Back Better: whereby the government in not an unusual effort estimated the cost to the taxpayer (consumer) of the programs, which were openly stated to be permanent, of only a few years and the taxes to pay for it to be for10 years
5. The FDA in handling the quality of generic drugs made in foreign nations whereby that agency used infrequent facility inspection and interviews with the manufacturing corporations without a more normal quality procedure of sampling the outgoing product. When foreign manufactures were found to have cheated on documentation the FDA was very slow to respond. A private lab got involved in sample testing product by its own volition. If anyone here wants the details of this matter, I will dig out the podcast. My own experiences in this matter was to inform my representative and two senators in a detailed emails and letters. After a delay I received a reply from one senator that was strictly boiler plate and totally uninformative. The second senator’s reply was in the vein of the FDA does not make mistakes and it had to be a drug company problem. The third reply came from the representative after a very long delay and some prompting I did on a neighborhood blog. He was defensive about the FDA and referred to some testing it did as though it was part of an ongoing quality assurance program. His background was science and manufacturing.
6. The difference in the initial cost a program is sold to the public and the actual cost of major government programs and military actions whereby the differences are often an order or more magnitude higher for the actual cost.
7. Obama in informing the public about Obama Care whereby he tells the consuming public that if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
Since the government cannot be fined or sued for fraud and false advertisement like private entities can be and further since actions from within the government on agency personnel seldom if ever assigns responsibility I see a dilemma.
The key comment in the LA Times article is:
Do we think we know what the very high number of infections will be and who will be infected and how well the South African and Great Britain experiences translate to the US? There remains some uncertainty here.
Kenneth, if most voters won’t punish bad government by ejecting them at the ballot box because they always vote for their tribe, then, yes, it is a problem. Government “accountability” is supposed to be “screw up and you get thrown out”.
Phil,
Watch what happens in November. Lots of screw-up (and screw-loose!) Dems who have refused to oppose absolutely crazy policies, are going to be voted out of office. The widening political divide (and the reluctance to vote for “the other tribe”) makes the scale of screw-up needed to get tossed from office larger than it was 30 years ago. But the Dems in Congress, with lots of help from dementia-Joe Biden, have screwed up so badly that they will get ‘a serious wuppin’ come November.
It’s somewhat trivial to make the case for the need of government (you like roads, right?) and the case of regulatory overreach (why is the government heavily regulating nail salons?).
.
So it is not so much an either/or to me, but a constant ongoing optimization and where lines need to be drawn. We shouldn’t be regulating business for imagined potential crimes, but be regulating as it shows a necessity.
.
Enforcement of business contracts against the many shysters out there is necessary (unfortunately many of these are lawyers, ha ha), also the criminalization of acutely bad behavior is necessary and there needs to be a posse available to get the bad guys. I just don’t see privatizing these matters as likely very efficient or more accountable.
.
There is an obvious problem of when the government becomes the shysters and how that is to be handled. See government unions, kickbacks, political corruption of all sorts. There is no reason whatsoever to think that government isn’t just as full of corrupt actors as other places. Voter accountability is only so effective when the corruption is hidden on a government level. I’m the number one media basher around, but they serve a unique role in helping root out government corruption.
.
The government is simultaneously an ungodly mess and the best we can make it. We need it for many things that can’t be easily converted to other means but we need to become just as good at constantly removing authority from government as we are at adding authority.
Speaking of problems with suing government.
.
University of Michigan to Pay $490 Million to Sexual Abuse Accusers
More than 1,000 people alleged abuse by former university doctor Robert Anderson, who died in 2008
https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-michigan-to-pay-490-million-to-sexual-abuse-victims-11642604547
.
“In 2018, Michigan State University agreed to a $500 million settlement for over 300 people who said they were sexually abused by former MSU sports-medicine doctor Larry Nassar. Nassar is in prison serving a 175-year sentence.”
.
MI population 10M. So every citizen of MI must pay $100 for UM and MSU employee’s alleged abuse? This money will come from taxpayers. So this is a justification for not being allowed to sue government (only taxpayers are punished and they had no responsibility). The taxpayer has bottomless pockets and 1000 accusers and likely as many lawyers know it (ahem … call me unempathetic but I very much doubt that number of victims).
Russell Klier (Comment #208710)
angech (Comment #208705)
1. I wrote: “Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak,†and you responded :“You could just say have doubled without using 100 as a figure.â€
100% of the previous peak means that the current number of patients are equal to the previous maximum number of patients during the delta outbreak. It does not mean double.
–
Cannot fault that logic.
Next time, perhaps help my comprehension skills and just say the same as instead of 100% of.
–
The problem remains that you used the post
Omicron analysis- Death and Destruction, preliminary.
to push a message that Omicron is a deadly variant of Covid, particularly in children.
–
The opposite is true. Covid is an extremely mild disease of children.
It is in fact a cold.
Do children die from catching a cold?
Yes, they can.
Do they die more often from catching covid than any other cold?
I doubt it.
Proof of the pudding being that we chose to vaccinate our most precious objects last.
If the numbers of children in hospital is the same as previously for 3 times as many infections then the disease is at worst 3 times less dangerous than delta.
One statistic never mentioned is the actual number of child deaths because they are so low.
This post assumes that Florida has just passed peak cases and those are almost exclusively Omicron cases.
Omicron seven day average case peak [71,000 new cases per day] is more than 3x higher than the previous variant [Delta] peak. This number is being suppressed by a testing bottleneck and the use of significant numbers of home test kits that are not being reported. I have no estimate of the amount of the undercount.
Current Adult Hospitalized Patients with Confirmed COVID-19 are 60% of the previous peak, but the count is still on a steep upward climb. Pediatric patients are about 100% of the previous peak, but the trend is also still upward.
ICU confirmed covid adult patient history is on a 404 error but I do have the recent trend. ICU patients are up 6X over the minimum recorded the week of December 10, and the trend is steeply upward.
Deaths are either on a downward trend, if you believe the official State of Florida numbers, or on a steep upward trend, if you use the unofficial numbers. The official numbers have lagged behind the unofficial numbers by 2-3 weeks since Governor Desantis changed the reporting system about six months ago. It is too early to do any analysis.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases_currenthospitaladmissions
https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/currently-hospitalized
2.You also wrote: “Using Pediatric Hospitalization stats in this way in a discussion about a disease that causes deaths in elderly people particularly and illness in older people would be best avoided.â€
Since the onset of Omicron in South Africa children have been at the forefront of the data. Many sources are studying the increased effect on children. Reporting the status of children in the Florida omicron outbreak is both responsible and appropriate.
3.Stultus
Any thoughts on the possibility of a second underwater volcanic explosion on that underwater [sort of ] Tongan island?
Having exploded and with the caldera underwater the water filling the volcano is likely to penetrate deeply over the next couple of days which might be the trigger for a second explosion with pockets of super heated steam?
angech,
I doubt sea water entering the remnants of the top of the volcano will lead to another explosion. Volcanic eruptions are normally driven by accumulating pressure far below the surface and at temperatures of magma, not boiling water. There could be a further eruption, but the history of that volcano suggests it will be quiet for a while.
angech (Comment #208732)
Did you repost my entire comment (Comment #208710) for some reason?
Stultus
Sorry Russell
Copy and paste issue on my part
Thanks Steve F
Doubtless I will regret asking, but what’s with the all the stultus?
mark bofill (Comment #208737)
“Doubtless I will regret asking†Yes, that’s true. “Stultus†Is a childish retort. It means “Fool†in Latin. I use it when someone attacks one of my posts and does something stupid at the same time. I only use it when the faux pas is glaring.
mark bofill,
People using ‘stultus’ instead of foolish or stupid remind me of William F. Buckley’s use of ‘nugatory’ to mean worthless or futile.
Thanks for your response.
And in the ‘now they tell us’ category, there’s this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/prior-covid-19-infection-offered-better-protection-than-vaccination-during-delta-wave-11642619009?st=o63x97tj7lgzq9b&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Duh! All the Roseanne Rosannadanna’s in the media who ranted that only vaccination counts should now be saying “nevermind.” I’m not holding my breath. I doubt that Australia will apologize to Djokovic either.
I anticipate an upcoming differing view of calling elections illegitimate from the MSM and Democrats based on Biden’s comment in his yesterday press conference where he said the prospect of the midterm election “being illegitimate is in direct portion to us not being able to get reforms passedâ€. I can see both the MSM and Democrats already gearing up for this approach. Their view of Trump’s assertions about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections and calling him on it was correct, but Biden’s assertions will be taken as truth revealed or at least a clever political strategy.
I am concerned that Joe Biden and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players at the White House are out of their depth in dealing with Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine situation.
Biden bungled the question yesterday and Psaki did a poor job later of taking back his mistake.
Getting this wrong could be very bad.
Russia is estimated to have over 6,000 nuclear warheads. The true number is unknown. Putin claims to be able to deliver those to the US mainland on rockets that we can’t defend against. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat
MAD still applies.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208730)
Tom, I found your post a thoughtful one with regards to government.
I would posit that there are problems inherent with government stemming from the necessity that it controls through coercion that cannot be countered by having the “good guys†with good intentions doing the controlling. The bigger and more powerful the government the more these inherent problems become apparent.
I sincerely believe that the functions that are currently thought in the exclusive domain of government by an overwhelming portion of the population are so considered because not much thought has been given to alternatives since those functions as government responsibilities are a given – even though a historical search finds that has not always been the case. Changing this thought process is something that if it were to occur would take a long time. Currently the trend is in the other direction whereby more power and control by governments is the order of the day. I see this daily when I read the news section of the WSJ where the writers only partially cover their personal disappointment when a large spending bill fails to make it through congress.
The best current approach in my view to countering this trend is to continually point to the inherent problems with government and do it on a non-partisan basis.
Tom, my reading of your view on these problems is that the voting public in the long run has a more sensible view of the world than that of the current intelligentsia and as such is a counterbalance to current trend. I read some libertarian writers with somewhat the same view. I am more of the mind that the voting public over the long run is mostly influenced by the current intelligentsia. I think this is most evident when considering the political views of younger college graduates who have been most recently greater exposed to the intelligentsia.
Lying by omission on prior infection protection has been glaring for a while. Not considering this for vaccine mandates is political, not scientific IMO.
.
I tried to lookup the relative protection from infection and vaccine for omicron a few days ago and it is radio silence from Team Science. This can mean more than one thing, there isn’t any good data yet or that it is being suppressed for messaging purposes. Based on recent history of public health and the CDC I suspect the latter. This is why you can’t manipulate the science messaging for short term gains.
.
The complete lack of curiosity on this subject from the media over the past year with the vast numbers of infected is unacceptable in my view. Now that the wrong people are getting infected in large numbers they might just become more curious, but no signs of that yet.
Russia won’t nuke us. What for. Biden has effectively announced that Russia is free to proceed in the Ukraine.
“being illegitimate is in direct portion to us not being able to get reforms passedâ€, … it’s OK for Russia to invade Ukraine a little bit…
.
Biden has been saying a lot of dumb things lately, and those are yet more rather unhelpful comments. Biden the uniter strikes again. If we lose it is due to illegitimate voting, if they lose and claim the same it is criminal and immoral behavior on their part.
Tom Scharf,
“…there isn’t any good data yet or that it is being suppressed for messaging purposes. Based on recent history of public health and the CDC I suspect the latter.”
.
Of course. Almost certainly (and the best evidence already says) protection from previous infection is better than protection from vaccination. The “big lie” from the Biden administration on covid is that previous infection is not protective….and that lie has been parroted endlessly for many months now.
.
Everything is becoming nothing more than a tool for the left to advance their agenda, even science…. and math! Those involved are so utterly dishonest that it almost beggars belief. I trust the next Republican president will promptly fire them all, starting with Fauci, if they don’t first resign, which no doubt many will.
mark bofill,
“Biden has effectively announced that Russia is free to proceed in the Ukraine.”
.
Of course, Biden is far too detached to understand the potential negative consequences of his stupidity, dementia, and the crazy statements he makes.
.
Russia wants ironclad assurances that the Ukraine is not going to become part of NATO. They also want permanent, formal, international acceptance of their annexing of the Crimea, which has a mostly Russian population, was historically part of Russia, and is a key Russian military port. These are non-negotiable for Russia. Biden is too stupid to even try to enter negotiations with Putin on these issues.
We cannot defend against a nuclear attack, period. The technology to defend against ballistic missiles is pretty new and likely not effective against a large scale attack and the arms race is such that systems are likely already avoiding this technology. Even if this was effective there are large submarine fleets that can deliver cruise missile nuclear warheads in large numbers in minutes from near offshore. Even if that was defended against smuggling a warhead into the US using common drug smuggling routes is trivial. Driving a rubber dinghy into a NYC harbor isn’t going to be that hard. An all out nuclear exchange will be near end of civilization level in the US.
.
We do a great job, eliminate half the attacking warheads and only get hit by 3000 large scale warheads…
.
The other side will get even worse. Nothing has changed here for the last 50 years. It’s very unlikely to get to this level, A US/USSR exchange will be won by China by not playing the game.
.
Even if we “won†a nuclear exchange with Russia those guys very likely have some of the nastiest biowarfare ever created that would be unleashed. We all understand this, so nothing is going to happen here.
Biden was saying what everyone already knows. Obama told Ukraine to back off and allow certain Russian takeovers or their entire country would be taken over by Russia and America would not help them. Ultimately it is not America’s place to allow or not allow these takeovers.
What is curious is Mr. Vindman, who said it was so bad that Trump has gone against the interagency consensus in linking Ukraine’s receiving weapons from America to corruption investigations, is entirely silent on Biden’s remarks. Pretty strange for someone who was offered Secretary of Defense(in Ukraine).
the logic of the vaccine mandate is not that it will prevent infection, but will reduce infection chance and chance of spreading.
For someone who is infected, they still insist on vaccination because vaccination+infection provides more protection than natural immunity alone.
In this case, then wherever vaccine mandates are in place, the people who are only vaccinated should be required to get infected to increase their immunity.
This assumes that vaccination+infection is better than vaccination alone.
The way Biden fumbles everything, he [or Putin] may stumble into a nuclear confrontation. These situations have too much downside to have a senile, angry old man chairing the Situation Room: “All told, there have been at least 22 alarmingly narrow misses since nuclear weapons were discoveredâ€
“The nuclear mistakes that nearly caused World War Threeâ€
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mistakes-that-could-have-ended-civilisation
MikeN,
The (non-Russian) Ukrainians I have met are adamant in their opposition to Russia; a complete take-over of the Ukraine is a Putin wet dream, nothing more. I think even Putin knows that Russia would not like to face a motivated Ukrainian insurgency, one well funded and supplied by the West.
.
Russia does not want to take over the whole country. They want to make sure the country does not become a military outpost for NATO. And they want the Crimea. It is not that complicated.
If we had infinite resources then everyone would get to tow their cigarette boats behind their Ferraris and nobody would care.
.
Part of the increasing power of government is the end product of increasing wealth. As society gets wealthier it can afford to spend more to help the less fortunate and on other activist hobbies. If you are below the poverty line, you are much better off to be living in SF than the slums of Rio.
.
One could say we are going to spend 20% of our GDP on welfare state efforts and might get some level of agreement from both sides. If we continue to increase per capita wealth then the power and scope of government will increase to manage those efforts. People used to die on the side of the road for lack of healthcare 100 years ago. We didn’t even have systems in place for that.
.
This is not to say there isn’t a lot of effort to continuously increase the scope of government using the wealth of others by activists, but there is a natural limit to their efforts. BBB may been technically killed by Manchin but it might be more accurate to say it was killed by inflation. I went shopping again today, inflation is very real and in your face. Another spending blowout is just not likely.
.
But I agree that government is too big, and that the natural impulse among too many is to make it even bigger to solve all problems small and large when the effective tools in the government toolbox aren’t appropriate. There are some problems that are endemic to society and throwing money at them only works to a point (e.g. public education).
.
On the other side of the ledger is healthcare. Paying $12K/person/year at 50 years old for basic healthcare is hard to justify. The private system is a complete mess (cost disease) and I see this going big government within 10 years. It’s not going to try to fix itself until it is too late, the incentives aren’t there. Perhaps government already ruined it, but this is a large scale failure of the private sector IMO.
Well this is amazing.
.
61 Senators sign letter to preserve filibuster rules
https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/07/politics/senate-filibuster-rules-letter/index.html
“The signatures of 28 Republicans, 32 Democrats and one independent is evidence that a broad mix of senators will back the filibuster for legislation.”
.
Oops, sorry. That was 2017, hundreds of years ago. I really just don’t understand what could have changed since then. It is notable that this effort is never brought up except in the opinion pages of the WSJ. If you don’t want to become a hopeless political and media cynic then do not read this article.
Thanks all.
Actually, Russia has nuclear torpedoes. Wiki here.
Tom,
My “prior” in immunity from infection is that if a vaccine can give immunity, then we should expect that infection can too. After all: The entire reason the vaccine gives immunity (or resistance) is the body “sees” something that looks like like the virus and then responds making antibodies for that. Those fit the actual virus and so the vaccine works.
.
Now, perhaps a vaccine can give ‘better’ immunity by triggering a stronger response because they give you a “bigger” dose and so the body makes “more”. But my impression is that is not what we generally observe with other diseases.
.
I’ve always assumed that the “messaging” was doing the medical community (not logical) messaging that “untested” = “not true”, which is an obvious fallacy. The vaccines we have work. They worked before they were tested. We just didn’t know.
.
Of course the other problem with immunity from infection is that there were people who want believe they were infected when they were not. (Yes. I know some of these people.) Merely believing you were infected obviously doesn’t confer immuity!! Heh.
.
Honestly, medical messaging can often be very, very stooooopid. One reason is it is sometimes deceptive or misleading.
.
I assume that when they get enough data and process it it will be very clear that people who had Covid get some immunity or resistance. Just like measles, mumps, small pox, chicken pox, german measles, polio, flu . . Everything we have a vaccine for.
And the degree to which a particular vaccine “lasts” will also be related to the degree to which natural immunity “lasts”. If the virus mutates– well, that will somewhat evade immunity or resistance. If it doesn’t, great! If, for some reason, the body “forgets” what it was vaccinated against it will tend to do so for both.
.
There are some nuances with the whole “spike” vs “whole virus” issue. But I think this is going to be the general pattern.
SteveF, Russian doesn’t want Crimea, Russia has Crimea. This may have been where Obama told Ukraine’s leaders(that Obama and Hillary installed) to back off, but I don’t remember.
mark bofill (Comment #208744) “MAD still applies.â€
Yes, that’s right and because of MAD there are 12,000 nuclear warheads on hair triggers.
The first strike targets will take out the opponents capability to retaliate….Satellites, command and control facilities, nuclear military assets, communication networks. Both sides have only minutes to decide how to react to a perceived attack before they become unable to defend themselves, whether the attack is real or just a sensing error.
What if: Tensions are high and Biden says something threatening, but doesn’t really mean it. Coincidently, Elon Musk launches a missile in Texas that Putin doesn’t have advanced intel on. What does Putin do? Sit on his thumbs and wait to see what happens or start his own launch sequence. Once he starts his launch sequence, we will detect it and we will start ours and he will detect us gearing up. The US and Russia are at the point of no return, and we have angry, sleepy old Joe with his finger on the button. Literally!
The messaging is hyper focused on vaccines and they always say get vaccinated even if you were infected. I don’t doubt it might help a little, some people more than others depending on how their immune systems responded. However the messaging always stays away from the relative strengths of infection vs vaccine protection, and the bottom line is it just wouldn’t be that hard to find out. Ask a 1000 people hospitalized about their vaccine and infection history. They use bazillions of CPU cycles in complex models trying to prove masks work, but previous infection? Meh.
.
Instead we get blandish answers conveying little numeric intelligence from science authorities. Even in DeWitt’s WSJ article, no numbers. It’s not just the US, it’s also other global major medical authorities.
.
It’s very strange to me, if I had known I had been infected I would be very interested in this answer for personal risk analysis. The overriding intent of public messaging appears to be behavioral control instead of information transfer. I don’t want just the conclusions of the experts when I suspect their motives, I want to see their work. I don’t want to be told what to do, I want to be given the tools to decide for myself.
I was reading up on the history of the space race and the claim was that the primary reason the Soviets beat the USA to the first man in space was that their old clunky nuclear warheads were so heavy that they had to design much bigger rockets to get them to the US, while the US’s warheads were much lighter. This gave the edge to the Soviets for heavy rocket payloads.
Tom
I think this tends to be the rule in medical messaging. It’s not just Covid. It’s worse with Covid because those messaging don’t want to say “we don’t really know” and because lots of decisions are political based on value judgements. Some of those “messaging” don’t want to admit that finding the correct balance between economic harm and risk of disease is not 100% a medical question. It’s also a value judgement.
“The first strike targets will take out the opponents capability to retaliate”
.
Nope. ICBM’s, Planes, Submarines, Space based weapons(?). Of these submarines are almost impossible to stop. Both sides can survive enough from a bolt-out-of-the-blue first strike to make the other side suffer immensely. The submarine fleet will survive, although the state of anti-submarine efforts are pretty hazy. Then you have the UK, France and other potential nuclear allies.
.
An accidental nuke launch (not even a misinterpreted SpaceX one) is a real threat. Both sides routinely launch actual nuclear missiles (without the payloads) to test their stock is still functioning. They run exercises all the time for preparedness. Both sides know within minutes exactly where ballistics missiles are going.
.
Reagan’s Star Wars defense system was so controversial because the Soviets believed it would allow a first strike capability. Now the rage is “hyper sonic” weapons.
.
Taking out hardened missile siloes might be viable with large warheads and accurate targeting but hitting one in Kansas from the USSR takes 30 minutes, thus the nuclear football the president carries around. DC is only 6 minutes away from a submarine strike and zero minutes away from a KGB smuggled bomb in a van.
.
All in all this is just an immense waste of money and effort for technology and weapons that will likely never be used. I don’t worry much about US vs Russia. I worry about Iran vs Israel and other less reasoned conflicts based on religious fervor.
Russell,
Accidents are always possible as you say.
Tom,
I agree with you. In particular:
Yes. MAD is a defense supported by game theory if one supposes rational players. I worry more about WMDs and religious zealotry than Russia, China, and other regional powers.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208756): “People used to die on the side of the road for lack of healthcare 100 years ago.”
.
I am skeptical of that claim, at least not as something normal.
Tom Scharf (Comment #208757): “It is notable that this effort is never brought up except in the opinion pages of the WSJ.”
.
Fox News delights in playing clips of Schumer, Biden, and Obama vigorously defending the filibuster and saying what a disaster it would be to get rid of it. Schumer claimed that getting rid of the filibuster would turn us into a banana republic.
.
Gee, I agree with Schumer on something.
Lucia, your prior seems to be getting a lot of supporting evidence.
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101.full
Tom Scharf,
So funny it almost hurts:”61 Senators sign letter to preserve filibuster rules”
..Preserving the filibuster 4 years ago against the evil Trump was perfectly OK, but preserving the filibuster against Joe Boden’s nutty policies is alighning eself with Jefferson Davis, and worse. If I think about this too much I may hurl.
The reason I went looking for omicron data was that this is a very good real world test of natural immunity vs vaccines. A significant variant emerges, who guessed better for the future, the human immune system or the mRNA nerds? I really don’t know this answer and say it is 50/50 from what I know.
.
Mr. Cynical says that if there was preliminary evidence that mRNA was holding up better we would already be hearing about it, if natural immunity was holding up better it would require much further careful study and until then there is “no evidence” that this is true.
Joe vs Vlad, The games have begun…. “ Biden warns Russia will ‘pay a heavy price’ if Putin launches Ukraine invasionâ€. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/jan/20/biden-presidency-democrats-senate-voting-rights-trump-live-latest?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-61e98fc98f085e8f4015b502#block-61e98fc98f085e8f4015b502
I am so tired of the ‘no evidence == not true’ argument. This is a well known logical fallacy known as the argument from ignorance. The argument that ‘no evidence == true’ is just as strong (i.e. not strong at all). IMO, the assumption based on what we already know from other diseases is that infection acquired immunity should be assumed to be at least as good as vaccination acquired immunity until there is evidence to the contrary.
Edit: Then there’s the whole mucosal vs humoral immunity. Vaccination by injection only gives you humoral immunity. Infection gives you both.
In my view governments grow and maintain a large size by three major means.
In the most authoritarian governments like a communist regime the initial growth was rapid through either a revolution or a takeover by an authoritarian foreign regime. Once in power those regimes maintain power through sheer force, indoctrination and rendering the populace more to completely dependent on government.
A second means is by growing because it can by wealth previously generated by a less authoritarian system and/or by the good fortune of having a goodly amount of natural resources. To continue to grow, and particularly when government growth starts negatively affecting the generation of wealth upon which the government depends, the populace must be made more dependent on government and indoctrinated to that end and finally by the aid of sheer force.
A third means involves circumstances like that that gave rise to the Nazis in Germany by way of a regime promising better times through government control of the economy, military takeovers of foreign lands and using a minority (in this case, the Jewish population) to wrongly blame for past and present ills.
An example of the effectiveness of the means of growing government through indoctrination and/or dependency were the reactions of a significant portion of the East German population after becoming part of unified Germany in adjusting to and liking life under a less authoritarian regime. Also think of the schemes to make everyone dependent on government by way of not means testing for government payments to individuals and using or proposing a wealth tax that could eventually make the wealthiest dependent on government if not already in that mode through crony capitalism handouts and favors.
China is a somewhat unique regime in that it acknowledged at some point that it needed to generate wealth in order to survive and maintain power while at the same time keeping the general population without “too much†freedom that could cause speaking out about government problems and deficiencies. Xi has realized that the trend was power going to the private sector and away from the Communist party and has changed direction whereby, I suspect, it becomes like other regimes in using past generated wealth for growing government.
Vaccine induced immunity against the Wuhan virus has a very narrow target: a small section of the spike protein. That should make it easier for the virus to evade, compared to natural immunity that recognizes many parts of the virus.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208773): “Then there’s the whole mucosal vs humoral immunity”.
.
Are you sure that “humoral immunity” is the correct term? I *think* that actually includes mucosal immunity. I am not correcting, just trying to learn.
Mike M.,
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.611337/full
I’m using the term ‘humoral’ to refer to serum antibodies and systemic cell-mediated immunity. IIRC, vaccination by injection does not produce an IgA response. Which is why testing for IgA is a better test for infection than IgG or IgM. Last I checked, which was a while ago, most tests did not include IgA.
As I remember, the Sabin polio vaccine replaced the Salk vaccine because the Sabin vaccine was administered orally and activated the mucosal immune system while the Salk vaccine was administered by injection. It worked, but not as well.
Edit: After reading more of the article, my understanding of IgA was incorrect. There is serum IgA generated by the bone marrow, but it doesn’t reach the mucosae.
I have found similarities between climate science and the sciences dealing with Covid-19 in the absence of papers on what an informed amateur in these matters finds puzzling. The frustration is very seldom any untruthfulness in what is written but rather what is left unwritten and why that occurs.
Two items from climate science come immediately to mind with the first being the lack papers discussing the issue of how the criteria for selecting temperature proxies must be determined prior and second how climate models with high equilibrium climate sensitivities can produce historical temperature trends that emulate well those of the observed trends. The second item has finally been given the attention it deserves in recent years.
With Covid-19 there has been a dearth of published analyses on people movement versus cases after the initial surge in early 2020 and very little on the relative importance of independent variables in regressions with cases and deaths as the dependent variable. I was discussing the issue of infection versus vaccination with my son the other day and the best we could come up with was initially reports seem to favor infection and then it was vaccinations and then crickets.
My opinion on these silences is conspiracy: no, cowardliness: maybe. I do think that the closer the science gets to being relevant to current policy the more likely there are going to be silence gaps in analyses.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208777): “I’m using the term ‘humoral’ to refer to serum antibodies and systemic cell-mediated immunity.”
.
Yes, I understood that. But I was asking if that is in fact the correct use of ‘humoral’.
The official spokespeople sometimes say the funniest things. “Infection may confer some immunity, but we can’t be sure for how long”. Some people still roll out that canard to this day. You haven’t figured that out yet, after two years? Could the answer possibly be “at least two years”? And if not, then you do know that answer. That was the go to answer until vaccines started timing out.
.
I would not be surprised if the near identical effect is happening with infection and vaccines since it would be sourced from the immune system. Why would they assume immunity waning was going to be so different with vaccines? If anything the mRNA tech should be the one they don’t know anything about. It’s not so much one topic, it’s the direction of all uncertain assumptions that always point to vaccines are great. Vaccines are fine, but they are trying so hard they distort the message.
.
I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, but just the normal 2020 era group social dynamics where a preferred narrative has taken hold to the detriment of information transfer. The stringent policing of covid information seems a bit over the top. Science has shown to be just as vulnerable to powerful groupthink as many other areas. That’s what happens when you let the popular kids run science instead of the nerds.
.
If you look hard enough you can usually find the info, it just takes more work than it should, and unpopular results get buried.
Tom,
This is one of my question. My prior would be that if one wanes so does the other. It would have to have something to do with our immune systems response to this particular virus.
Of course. They didn’t have data on how long they would last– until the protection started to wane. That lack of data was communicated as suggesting vaccines don’t wane but the same lack of data as suggesting natural immunity would never made any sense.
lucia,
That’s why the argument from ignorance is so versatile. It allows you to argue either side of a proposition. But in fact, all you know is that you don’t know. The thing is that journalists should know this and not fall for it when their subjects engage in it. But that would require them to actually analyze what was being said rather than simply spinning it to fit whatever narrative they’re pushing.
Mike M.,
Somebody here posted about immunity using ‘humoral’ for injected vaccines and ‘mucosal’ for oral or nasal vaccines. I never bothered to check if that was the correct usage. I could probably find it if I were motivated enough to bother. But right now, I’m not. Almost certainly a nasally administered SARS-CoV-2 would be more effective than an injected vaccine, but I suspect that packaging is the problem.
DeWitt, a dumb question. Would what you say imply that on average nasally Covid-19 infected individuals have better immunity than an uninfected persons injected with a vaccine?
Kenneth Fritsch,
That would be my working hypothesis. It would seem that the data also supports this, but the powers that be have been very reluctant to admit this. I sort of understand as it’s likely that most people that have had infections either don’t know they had it or failed to get tested to confirm it. The attitude of the ‘experts’ in the US is that you should get vaccinated anyway because, unlike a number of other countries, they have made no provision for infection acquired immunity.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #208783): “Somebody here posted about immunity using ‘humoral’ for injected vaccines and ‘mucosal’ for oral or nasal vaccines.”
.
That might have been me. But then I decided that probably was not the correct use of ‘humoral’.
Fair bit of discussion about mucusal via nasal vaccines in the RadVac whitepaper.
https://radvac.org/white-paper/
Yesterday, Biden casting doubt on the upcoming elections:
“I’m not saying it’s going to be legit. The increase and the prospect of it being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.”
So, while Trump was president in 2020 Biden argues the elections were completely legitimate and Democrats won everything. Now the Democrats are in charge of everything and the legitimacy of the 2022 elections are in doubt! Funny how things work.
Phil,
I’d forgotten the name of that project. So they are still up to that! I wonder where they get volunteers to experiment on themselves now that at least some form of tested vaccine is available.
.
It’s got to be ridiculously hard to create a decent, clean, testing protocol! After all: taking the approved vaccine before or after the Radvac makes the data difficult to interpret!
.
I might be willing to submit to the self test if there were no vaccines and nothing to deal with new mutations in sight. If turn around time for development and FDA approval had proved s_l_o_w. (And then I’d want to find someone trust-worthy about doing wet lab work with their own wet lab! I’m sure “Walter White” had the skillzzzzz. But in the script, he died in a shoot out or something like that.)
.
But neither happened.
.
The current vaccines seem to at least generally protect against severe disease, and one tailored to Omicron may be available in March. (And Omicron seems less virulent.) I wouldn’t not taken them to contribute good data to the RadVac program!!
.
I don’t object to the Radvac group doing what they are doing. But I can’t say I think it makes sense to become a test subject if you live in the US. (Maybe it’s worth it if you live where you can’t get vaccine. )
Lucia,
“And Omicron seems less virulent.”
.
Yes, and everywhere that I have looked for an estimate of the difference (compared to delta) I find a factor of ~4 to ~5 fewer fatalities. We will get a very clean estimate of the difference when the Florida data are all valid. The peak in cases in Florida came on about January 8 (centered moving 7-day average), at about 65,000 per day. The peak in deaths should be no later than about January 22 to 24. Since Florida reports deaths for the actual date of death on the death certificate, there is always a 14 to 16 day delay for the death count for any date to be accurate. The peak rate in deaths from omicron in Florida should be known accurately sometime near February 8. BTW, both hospitalizations and intensive care hospitalizations have started dropping in Florida, two weeks after the peak in cases.
.
If the drop in omicron cases follows the trends that have happened elsewhere, omicron will have caused about 2.5 million confirmed cases in Florida by the end of February, and no doubt many more unconfirmed cases
There are a large number of anti-vaxxers out there in the US who would submit to lots of voodoo solutions, so I think they could get enough volunteers. One issue is self selecting anti-vaxxers are likely not representative of the general population.
“At Davos a few years ago the ???? survey showed us that that the good news is the Elite across the world trust each other more and more, so we can come together and design and do beautiful things together. The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted that Elite less.” – WEF
Third Dose of Pfizer, Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines Offers Strong Protection Against Omicron
https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-wave-eases-in-parts-of-u-s-france-sets-plan-to-relax-curbs-11642770561
.
“During the Delta period, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization from Covid-19 was 90% from two weeks until about 6 months after dose two, 81% from at least six months after dose two and 94% at least two weeks after a booster dose. When Omicron was dominant, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization for the same periods were 81%, 57% and 90%, respectively.”
.
Delta 90/81/94
Omicron 81/57/90
.
Alternate headline: “Vaccines less effective against Omicron CDC says”. A significant difference in boosters for omicron and 90% is still good, 57% not so much. This is likely important and valid information, but it does fit the preferred narrative of you aren’t vaccinated unless you are boosted. Sometimes the preferred narrative is true. Boosted vaccines are about 50% protective against infection from omicron.
.
In other news Israel says a 4th shot doesn’t help much over a 3rd shot. This is probably because there wasn’t much time between the 3rd and 4th shots for this study. As the vaccines wane, the next shot would be more effective one assumes.
.
Sigh … double sigh …
“Separate research the CDC published on Wednesday showed that among patients in California and New York during the Delta wave, prior infection provided more protection against Covid-19 than vaccination, though both offered significant defense from the virus. The data was collected before Omicron’s emergence and the widespread booster campaign, so many people were likely experiencing some degree of waning immunity from vaccination. The CDC said the findings couldn’t be applied to the Omicron wave.
The agency also said in that report that vaccination was the safest way to acquire immunity against the virus because contracting Covid-19 carries the risk of serious illness or death, even among people at lower risk.”
.
The framing here is the same ridiculous take we have been discussing.
” … prior infection provided more protection against Covid-19″ How much exactly?
” … couldn’t be applied to the Omicron wave”, why not? It provides zero evidence? Why is omicron expected to be different?
“.. . some degree of waning immunity from vaccination”, but no waning from infection?
Also exactly nobody is making an argument to intentionally get omicron as a defense against omicron.
Tom Scharf,
It also has to be a sub-set of anti-vaxxers who are willing to take an experimental vaccine!
.
Given the range of reasons given for not taking the available one, I have no doubt this niche exists. But they have to
(1) hold out against being ‘forced’ to take the FDA approved ones. (Some ballroom dance competitions are now requiring proof of vaccination. So I know a few people who held out and are now taking it.)
(2) Not actually be anti vax. Just anti the ones offered.
(3) Somehow recognize that the vast majority of claims of what might be wrong with the offerred vaccines could apply to this experimental one!
.
Presumably they could be made to believe that this one doesn’t contain Bill Gate’s microchip!! 🙂
FYI: Here is the CDC prior infection study:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
.
This is a complicated presentation of data. The best place to look is the figure at the end of the report showing hazard rate trendlines.
.
Vaccination started showing worse results over previous infection as the trendlines crossover around July 11th (!!!, the CDC has been sitting on this data collected every two weeks for over 6 months now).
.
If I am reading this correctly (last 2 columns of Table 2), * prior infection shows 5X (!!!) better protection * than vaccination/no prior infection. It’s not even close. They both do well compared to unvaccinated/uninfected.
.
There is ~20% difference between the vaccinated with prior infection and unvaccinated with prior infection groups hazards. The graph is not scaled good to really see this, have to look in the table. Vaccinating the infected helps a little.
.
Ummmm … I think my confidence in the CDC messaging just dropped another couple notches. They have known this for half a year now while saying prior infection should not count for vaccine mandates. We just follow the science. If the relative protection changed with the delta variant then it would be reasonable to expect it to change even more with omicron.
.
I will give the CDC credit for doing the study. It’s being underplayed for its relative importance in the media, as one would expect.
Tom,
Yeah, if you haven’t had Covid, there is a clear benefit to being vaccinated. And if you are past…. oh…. 40, it’s definitely the sane way to go rather than saying, “Well, I’ll just get Covid.” (I’d say its even sane if your younger. But it’s arguable one way or the other.)
But getting Covid clearly confers resistance or immunity, and it looks generally better than vaccines. Being vaccinated after getting Covid makes a miniscule difference in any absolute sense. (Half of practically no risk is less, but it’s still practically no risk.)
.
This is inline with what you would expect. It should be anyone’s prior and the data just support that.
Tom Scharf,
“I think my confidence in the CDC messaging just dropped another couple notches. They have known this for half a year now while saying prior infection should not count for vaccine mandates.”
.
My confidence in the CDC is unchanged: just about zero. I mean really, look at the data. It is plain (and just as an Israeli study clearly showed) recovering from covid infection is much more protective than getting vaccinated. But is that key information even presented? Hell no! They just keep beating the political drum for more vaccinations for everyone. They do not even mention the most important finding of the study anywhere in the abstract or introduction. It is written like a bunch of very confused 7th graders write chemistry lab reports…. no doubt to further hide the only important finding of the study: Un-vaccinated people who have recovered from covid are at *far lower risk* of contracting the illness than vaccinated people. Those people also pose a far smaller risk of infecting others than the vaccinated…. making the Biden administration’s blanket demand for vaccinations absurd on its face, and reckless to boot.
.
It is a politically motivated tossing of crucial public policy information down the memory hole. All involved should be fired.
If I was a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not, I would question the timing of the release of this data to be just after the SC vaccine mandate case was decided.
.
But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. At all. I’m.Not. Never. I would never think it might be a good idea to FOIA emails on this study release timing. That would be ridiculous.
.
In theory it shouldn’t have mattered to the legal outcome, but it would have reduced the credibility of the appeal to CDC authority and might have made for some rather uncomfortable questions.
Just to keep my status as a bipolar CDC analyst, this is probably the best study to date on prior infection relative immunity.
Tom Scharf,
I think the Israeli study was better and infinitely clearer in it’s presentation of data.
Yes, of course the CDC has been hiding this information for political purposes. Just like the FDA delayed announcing the positive results of the Pfizer vaccine phase 3 study until a few days AFTER the election, to be sure Trump wouldn’t get any credit for the vaccine development from voters. The FDA and the CDC are dishonest and utterly corrupt. They should be completely restructured, drastically reduced in size, and most of the bureaucrats fired.
.
I do hope the next time the dishonest Evil Elf (Fauci) gets called before congress he is pressed on the results of this study…. “Dr. Fauci, if previously infected and recovered individuals are far less likely to catch and spread covid, why does the CDC not recommend that recovered individuals be exempted from Federal vaccine mandates?” “Dr Fauci, if these results, crucial for sensible public policies, were known by the CDC for 6 months, why were they not announced to the public?”
Tom Scharf (Comment #208797)
The study would/should have bearing on the rules for professional athletes that have not been vaccinated but infected. There are leagues and cities that treat the previously infected as they do the unvaccinated.
I heard a sportscaster today talking about previously infected Aaron Rodgers being allowed to play by the NFL without being tested. He was very upset. Maybe the NFL had read the report and sportscaster missed it or maybe the sportscaster makes a living out of being upset – as some of his later comments indicated.
The coverage of this study is depressingly as expected. NYT didn’t even cover it. Reuters gets an A+ for Conciseness and Accuracy in title and paragraph 1.
.
Reuters: “Prior COVID infection more protective than vaccination during Delta surge -U.S. study”
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/prior-covid-infection-more-protective-than-vaccination-during-delta-surge-us-2022-01-19/
“People who had previously been infected with COVID-19 were better protected against the Delta variant than those who were vaccinated alone, suggesting that natural immunity was a more potent shield than vaccines against that variant, California and New York health officials reported on Wednesday.”
.
Misleading:
NBC: “Past Covid infection protected against delta, but vaccines safest to prevent dire illness, CDC says”
.
Clearly misleading.
CNN: “When the Delta variant dominated, vaccination and prior infection protected against Covid-19, but vaccination was safest, study finds”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/health/covid-vaccine-infection-protection-cdc-study/index.html
.
Now this is funny. This is an early version of the exact same CNN article above before it was “updated” two hours later (New story – Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described protection against hospitalization). It is quite interesting to compare them.
Covid disinformation! Twitter ban time! Five strikes! Welcome to opposite land.
WDSU: CDC study: Vaccination protects against COVID hospitalization significantly more than prior infection
https://www.wdsu.com/article/cdc-study-vaccination-protects-against-covid-hospitalization-significantly-more-than-prior-infection/38818343#
.
The stoopid spin here is that this study shows it is “safer” to get vaccinated than get infected. This is trivially true, and I don’t believe I have to actually say this, but the importance of this study is that if you are already infected you are better off than the vaccinated.
.
There, I said it, it wasn’t that hard. I still support vaccination. Oh brother, I need to say that, right? Am I still allowed in Club Vaccine?
.
One was shown to be 5X better than the other, so science says:
“Together, the totality of the evidence suggests really that both vaccination and having survived Covid each provide protection against subsequent reinfection”
OMG CANCEL HIM!!! CANCELCANCELCANCELCANCEL control-alt-CANCEL!
[Edit: / SARC TAG]
Tom Scharf (Comment #208804): “The stoopid spin here is that this study shows it is “safer†to get vaccinated than get infected. This is trivially true”.
.
That is not obvious. It is certainly true for older people, may or may not be true for young adults, and is quite likely false for children.
So Aaron Rogers is far less likely to catch and spread covid than his vaccinated teammates, but he still gets denounced as a selfish moron (and worse) by the MSM. The MSM is simply dishonest and evil.
SteveF,
The same applies to Australia’s treatment of Novak Djokovic. It was pure politics, not science. But then again, parts of Australia seem to be acting like China, not a parliamentary democracy.
AP: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the study Wednesday, noted several caveats to the research. And some outside experts were cautious of the findings and wary of how they might be interpreted.”
.
Let me rephrase my prior comment:
“If you aren’t dead AND you didn’t get seriously ill AND you didn’t transmit the virus to someone else who died AND you are already infected THEN you are better off than the vaccinated. Getting covid to protect yourself from future covid is a bad plan according to unnamed outside experts who have really thought this bafflingly complex logic through fully and are much smarter than everyone. One cannot be expected to figure this out on their own without the benefit of science training. Expert science training indicates that experts should just say vaccines are safer and infer they are more protective while very cleverly leaving in plausible deniability that experts aren’t actually lying, because we all know experts are so very clever, especially when they are anonymous”.
.
What a messaging mess. It is getting as bad as climate science, you have to go to the source material.
Tom Scharf,
“It is getting as bad as climate science..”
.
With the common thread being both are overwhelmingly political and not really based on science at all. But I’d say covid policies are actually much worse than climate policies: more immediately damaging and costly to individuals, more immediately damaging to the economy, and with so high an interest in the public that endless lies, deceptions, and misleading statements about covid are terribly harmful.
DeWitt,
If I were Djokovic, I would set my career grand slam title record without ever playing in Australia again…. and would make that decision publicly and loudly, pointing out that the Australian authorities are utter imbeciles, and the country not worth visiting under any circumstances.
The CNN rewrite is a perfect public test case for media bias. The editor/author apparently initially read the data exactly backwards (as I said the data presentation was complicated). They wrote the headline they liked, then found out it was backwards. In an unbiased world this would have happened:
.
Before: “CDC study: Vaccination protects against COVID hospitalization significantly more than prior infection”
.
After: “CDC study: Prior infection protects against COVID hospitalization significantly more than vaccination”
.
Instead: “When the Delta variant dominated, vaccination and prior infection protected against Covid-19, but vaccination was safest, study finds”
.
Bias in science journalism just doesn’t get any clearer than that. This reminds me of the Pages2K (?) fiasco over at Climate Audit.
I wonder if Australia would deny Djokovic future visas on the grounds he violated our rules in the past.
Djokovic
Could not beat the system.
PM said no.
His immigration minister said no.
Court said the Minister has absolute power in this instance.
Reminds of where the USA seems headed.
Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar criticized Biden on the border.
Now the FBI has raided his house.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
Ike’s farewell TV address….
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded,” “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. … The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present …”
“Did Ike Foresee Fauci and Big Tech 61 Years Ago?â€
https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/eisenhower-farewell-address-fauci-covid/2022/01/20/id/1053319/
Joe Biden’s approval/disapproval numbers (Real Clear Politics average of polls) have reached Trumpian territory with over 55% now disapproving and only 40% approving. The even bigger issue is that Biden started a year ago with approval levels in the upper 50’s. Is there a real minimum for Biden’s support? Yes, probably the ~30% of voters who describe themselves as very liberal/progressive.
.
The historical graph of Biden’s approval/disapproval rate shows step-like changes each time Biden has really screwed up, with his ugly speech this week declaring half the country to be racists and traitors like Jefferson Davis being just the most recent. His press conference this week may have worse consequences, since it could well lead to Russia invading eastern Ukraine and declaring it a permanent part of Russia… along with Crimea…. both regions with majority-Russian populations.
.
When a dementia patient is president, lots of very bad things happen. The guy should be removed from office, but the alternative is just as incompetent and foolish as Biden, so would be no improvement.
PSA:
WHO DEY
Bengals 24
Titans 17
Andrew Out (You may now continue with regular programming)
Russell Klier (Comment #208816): “Did Ike Foresee Fauci and Big Tech 61 Years Ago?â€
.
Indeed. Ike’s foresight re the military-industrial complex has been noted for decades. That evil is once again playing out re Ukraine. Less noted has been his foresight as to the corruption of science by government. That can be seen most obviously in climate sciences and covid.
Very good article on the CDC politicizing science by pushing fake science.
.
https://www.city-journal.org/public-healths-truth-problem
.
“.. Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility..â€
The Bungles have actual fans?
If there is a stock market slide (we are about due for one of those, it has been a very long winning streak) then Biden will be toast. The professional class portion of his constituency will start peeling off pretty quick when the retirement accounts start heading the wrong direction. They might mindlessly chant the woke gospel to each other, but that costs them nothing. The anti-corporate progressives (Sanders/Warren wing) will lose support in a nanosecond from this group once the 401K statements start getting thrown in the garbage without being opened.
Could you imagine what the reaction would have been had Trump (you know, the Trump-Russian collusion guy …) said it might be OK for Russia to do just a little invasion? Ha ha. The press would have been apoplectic.
Tom Scharf,
The combination of unsustainable sock market prices, unsustainable housing market prices, unsustainable rental prices, and most of all, unsustainable Federal budget deficits, means a substantial correction is needed. Housing prices rose 18% in the last 12 months… following multiple other years of crazy price increases.
.
Near my small house on Cape Cod, a 1970’s vintage, 1,200 sq ft house with 3 (v small!) bedrooms and one bath, on 1/8 acre, located more than half a mile walk from the ocean, is offered for the very attractive price of $699,000. Any closer to the ocean jumps quickly to >$1 million…. for a very small house. It is nuts. Of course, stock price inflation is in large measure driving housing price inflation…. it’s all make-believe stock market money, you know. The bubble(s) will break.
Groundhog day will see a Covid free [almost!] Florida… We will be back at the baseline of about 3,000 cases per pay. My guess based on a graphical interpolation and extrapolation of: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases
Well Omicron finally arrived here so an interesting natural experiment about to begin. Government is saying no lockdowns citing vaccination rates are over 90% for 12+. With almost no natural immunity around, this should be an interesting experiment in vax effectiveness. Trying to sort out my priors on this. Government is comparing to Ireland with about same population and similarly high vax rates. However Ireland has higher population density, more natural immunity but got omicron in winter whereas it is summer here. Australia is also similar for vax, but acquired a lot more cases with delta.
My prediction: New Zealand will have a LOT of omicron cases (at least if they test madly, as done elsewhere) but very few hospitalizations or deaths.
I think high case no.s is a given. Some modellers predicting 50% of population but mostly expect suppression measures to make that lower. The “phased response” system that government is using for planning is looking at up to 50,000 (1%pop.) per day. The interesting question to me is how we will fair compared to comparable countries with more natural immunity.
MikeM, Phil
What’s the vaccination level in NZ?
Lucia,
NZ has 174,000 doses administered per 100,000 population. Take away kids, and that is nearly everyone.
Phil Scadden (Comment #208847): “Some modellers predicting 50% of population but mostly expect suppression measures to make that lower.”
.
I think there has been a consistent pattern of cases peaking at much lower levels than predicted by models. For unknown reasons.
.
Let’s see: The omicron wave has produced about 20M cases in the US, so maybe 10-15% of the population by the time it is done. I am guessing that New Zealand will top that.
Overall it is around 80% double vax, but 95% for those 12+. Boosters are only around 25% of eligible population, but since the government target of 90% eligible vax target was only met in Dec, many not due, even with interval for between 2nd and 3rd reduced to 4 months. Coverage is a bit spotty. Very high vax rates in the 3 bigger cities, but worryingly low (89% single vax) in northland which has many isolated, rural, predominantly Maori communities. Maori rates are lower across the board, especially compared to Pacifika.
Well…. decent vax rate. The vaccines aren’t perfect, but evidence indicates they do reduce severity of omicron. And omicron is almost certainly milder. For NZ’s sake, let’s hope that’s true.
Mike – the 50% no. was definitely the outer end of the model results and over quite a long time period. Everyone is hoping for a much lower no. Being late to the party with vaccines means that hopefully we get reasonable effectiveness. The government 50,000/d was based on no modelling at all, but a “number” to use for response planning that was hopefully a big overestimate.
There’s a lot of factors here so it’s really hard to predict.
.
Two shot vax protection against infection is very weak, 10% according to some data. Around 50% for boosters. So once the transmission starts up the vax rate may not be very helpful. It should limit the serious illness substantially and omicron is milder.
.
One the other side NZ has a naïve population and it’s possible that there is a population subset that is more vulnerable to covid serious illness that has never seen it so the mortality rate may be higher initially. This info is really unknown.
.
Natural immunity is holding up 5X better than vax immunity and omicron swept through most places that likely had ~50% prior infection rates (EU, UK, US). It’s not documented if this trend holds for omicron, but it seems probable.
.
It’s not winter in NZ so that might help now, but might make the 2nd surge worse later.
.
In summary there are enough confounders to make it difficult to gauge. The best news is it is way better to get hit hard with omicron than it was with the other strains. NZ could in theory hold out hard again and hope for a better vaccine coming in March but omicron is going to be really hard to keep out, but so was delta. Ultimately though, it’s coming, and it can’t be stopped. I think covid zero is hopeless now, that will be an endless battle. The body’s waning immunity just guarantee’s endless cycles of covid. There is no herd immunity endpoint, only in a sense that it will keep the surges at lower numbers.
.
The US has hit the end of pandemic fatigue, we are mostly just moving on. The emotional stress factor is declining. Part of that is that everyone knows lots of people who have gotten covid and were fine, so they can emotionally gauge the actual threat.
Nobody understands the one or two month covid surges that just “end” without just burning all the way to herd immunity. The latest theory was that they are hitting endpoints of transmission for natural social groups that have boundaries. Similar to forest fires that just don’t burn down everything. But what we really know is nobody knows why. NZ may very well just be hit by 4-5 waves over the next couple years in a replay of the US and EU. Or not, ha ha.
Natural immunity doing better against delta is interesting. The human immune system that has been trained over 1000’s of generations being a better predictor for unknown future variants may show that the original vaccine was “over-fitted” to the original strain while the immune system produces a more general purpose protection that is more likely to work on variants. One would kind of expect this to happen and that the mRNA nerds would close the gap quickly (decades).
“NZ could in theory hold out hard again”
.
nah, wouldnt make any sense. At this stage, hoping that vax rates will keep within hospital capacity. They have said that contact tracing will continue to be used to limit speed of spread until cases hit 1000/d at which point continuing is useless, but hopefully more people will have had 3rd shot by then. Fingers crossed. Another interesting question is whether it is best to get omicron asap after 3rd shot in hopes that vax will limit serious illness and combination will protect you for a long time.
Tom Scharf,
“…may show that the original vaccine was “over-fitted†to the original strain while the immune system produces a more general purpose protection that is more likely to work on variants.”
.
I suspect it is less an ‘over-fit’ than a narrowly targeted portion of the virus. Natural immunity is certainly going to be broader in the sense that many different regions of the virus capsid could be be targeted, not just one small piece. I believe homologous protein sequences in other (common cold) coronaviruses gave a lot of people some pre-existing resistance, at least in terms of symptomatic illness, since nowhere were illness rates as high as many were predicting for completely naïve populations.
Phil Scadden,
Based on other countries, NZ is likely to have a death rate from omicron under 1:500 cases, and maybe under 1:1000 cases. Still, you have to expect there will be one or two thousand deaths, maybe more.
Tom
Yep. I think NZ is wise to be prepared for the worst, but I hope for the best. NZ was one of the few places were keeping it out could possibly work. But once it’s really in, that’s going to be it. Omicron vaccines should be available in March. It’s a bit of a race here, so I hope it really is milder as it has seemed when it’s hit countries with some natural immunity.
While I suspect it is somewhat premature to see what the future of omicron will be in the US, I put together 5 plots of historical time series covering most of the Covid-19 period. Those plots linked below show (1) the US weekly cases, (2) the US weekly deaths, (3) the US weekly deaths to cases ratios, (4) the total US weekly PCR tests and (5) the US weekly portion of positive PCR tests. All the plots include a cubic spline smooth that is abbreviated as a cubic smooth in the plot title. My intended purpose here was looking for changes in these time series corresponding with the onset of the omicron variant and how confidently any trends might be extrapolated into future weeks.
The cases plot shows the obvious accelerated steep climb of cases over the past few weeks to levels not seen in the Covid-19 period. I judge that it is too early to determine how wide the current cycle will be in the US and if it has indeed peaked. Interesting are the periodic cycles seen in the plot which are fairly evenly spaced at a rate of 3 per year. The current cycle is occurring approximately 1 year later than the surge in late 2020 and early 2021. I have found that seeing general trends and cycles with Covid-19 cases and deaths takes reasonably large populations and weekly data.
Deaths follows cases in the US with an approximate 4 week lag as can be seen in comparing the cases and deaths plots as well as viewing the maximum correlation with weeks lag in the table.
As seen in the ratio plot the deaths to cases ratios before omicron appeared to asymptotically approach a ratio of 0.013 while with the start of omicron that ratio is trending rather steeply downward. This is not unexpected but where the asymptote occurs is very much up in the air. Earlier plots of deaths to cases ratios versus number of tests were leveling off as though the periods of heavy testing were sampling enough of the US population to get a good estimate of the ratio for the entire population.
The fourth plot of the total tests shows the surge in testing with the omicron onset and to much higher levels than for any other surge in the Covid-19 period.
The fifth plot of the portion of positive tests is at the highest level of the Covid-19 period in the most recent cycle and continues to climb adding to the uncertainty of where the peak for cases will occur.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cm88zs8nyr6thgp/Cases_Deaths_Test_Omicron_Start.pdf?dl=0
Cases and deaths data source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Tests data source: https://us-dhhs-aa.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/j8mb-icvb_2022-01-22T12-00-42.csv