Posted on 05/01/2021 8:29:02 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
I wonder how many of the new cases had already been fully “vaccinated?”
Very few and new data from Israel show very mild cases in those who’ve been vaccinated and contract virus despite other serious illnesses.
Might want to add something or just stop reporting. 1 May the entire state of NY did not issue any numbers at all. There are other states not doing so daily, but NY is typically huge numbers and so all graphs are going to be bogus until they catch up.
It’s the weekend. I noticed that my state (North Carolina) is not doing any actual reporting during the weekend so they wait until Monday to report the weekend’s stats.
The Texas 7 day moving average deaths went up 1 (from 51 to 52), but when you average the last 7 days, you get 49.75, the lowest since July 4th weekend 2020.
Their 7 day average doesn’t seem to be only averaging the last 7 days.
Several do that. Today was new for NY, and NY numbers are very large. It will be weeks before the graphs will catch up.
July 4th last year was the start of a summer uptick. It fell again until Oct/Nov when the explosion began.
There was nothing puzzling about all that. The initial infection country wide concentrated in the Northeast. So that limited the numbers because the country as a whole has higher population than just the Northeast.
What would seem meaningful is the decline from April/May peak to the low early July was about 76%, which is pretty much the same % decline-from-peak as we see now, with the decline having gone flat. Does not say much for the vaccines.
Though three things worth noting. First, “fully vaccinated” has a very strict definition. Two doses 3 weeks minimum apart and then another 2 weeks after the 2nd dose. This means no one who started the vaccinations after essentially mid March is fully vaccinated and even fewer because people don’t rush out on day 21 after dose 1. Could be a week or two more. So call it early March.
The second item is forget cases. If you had strong symptoms (coughing and fever for days) pre vaccination, you’ll likely go get tested. But if you’re vaccinated, not fully vaccinated, just vaccinated, and symptoms arrive, you probably will presume you are mostly bulletproof and tough it out and not get tested. So we can’t have a case if we don’t have a positive test. You could be putting placebo in arms and cases will fall — because people just won’t bother getting tested.
Third, these vaccines were made a year ago. Then testing started. They are very old vaccines in a mutating environment. By the time they got serious numbers into arms in . . . maybe late February . . . well over 6 months of mutations and have a look at that death curve. The slope did not steepen. Not even a few degrees. No steepening at all, and now it has done the reverse. This really is impossible with vaccination numbers in the millions and millions. Unless they don’t work.
We don’t have enough people vaccinated to see major and obvious impacts yet. Israel does. They went from an average of nearly 10,000 cases per day and 100 deaths per day down to 52 cases per day and 1 death.
So clearly something is working.
Reality check:
The new case numbers will never be known. Those shown are only those tested and false positive tests are extremely high.
Deaths reported consist of anyone having covid when they died. Covid isn’t necessarily the cause of death.
Death rates are way off because those actually infected and those actually dying from the disease will never be known.
Numbers going down are far more likely being related to herd immunity because the actual infected and recovered was probably 20 times higher than those tested.
I’d argue that:
1) Nowhere I know of has it been true that naturally acquired herd immunity has yet been enough to prevent recurring waves of COVID-19. Some people thought India might have achieved a measure of herd immunity, heck, I even gave that idea some credence, but it was obviously incorrect.
2) Human behavior is one of the key factors in infectious disease spread. The easing of mandates aside, behavior here in the US is, so far as I can personally observe, trending strongly in the direction of higher transmission. Mobility, gatherings, mitigation fatigue, and more, are all on the increase, and, really, must be. A society such as ours just can’t be shut down for so long and survive. It has already taken great damage. Instinct tells most to resume mostly normal lives in the face of an apparent decreasing risk, and at present a sort of balance seems to be in place.
3) Variants may be a factor. I suppose this needs either in depth discussion, or just leave it as stated. ;-)
4) There may be a continuing sort of “floor” of COVID-19 injured / complication injured people finally dying off. I have anecdotally seen this a lot: An elderly person in pretty good health takes a hit, so to speak, from a disease or physical injury, the doctors pull them through, but “diminished”, and then they die within the year. This is very common after hip fractures in elderly folks, for example. The injury would not seem to be fatal, but, given some time, the repercussions are.
5) Have I missed something or things? Almost certainly.
Then I take another look at India’s recent incredible acceleration of cases compared to their 1st year of COVID-19, and taking the above into account, perhaps all things considered, like the British at Malta trying to hold off the Germans and Italians, maybe hanging in there or only a slight improvement in the situation actually is doing quite well.
Another thought for the discussion.
It’s very popular, particularly on right wing sites, to dwell on deaths with Covid vs deaths of Covid and how that can corrupt numbers. No question there was some financial incentive for hospitals to have covid patients. They got more money from the stimulus packages. There was a PCR cycle count issue, recently addressed, that was generating some false positives.
But.
There is also a hugely common mechanism for undercounting Covid deaths. Like so:
It has become essentially normal in the US for elderly to live alone. The number has grown in recent years. These are folks that read the news. They know things about Covid — most survive it, there’s no agreed on treatment for it,
So there’s the old person living alone who starts running a fever and coughing. He or she reasons survival is likely, and nothing could be done about it anyway, though maybe ventilator might help etc. So they just wait to give it a few days before panicking.
And then they die during the night.
They live alone. It will be days or weeks before the smell brings a police wellness check. Note that — this is such a common thing that police have a formal procedure defined — and wellness check.
So they get to the door, smell the small, ambulance comes and loads the corpse up for the morgue and off they go.
There’s no Covid test. It’s a dead old guy. There may or may not ever be an autopsy. Most likely not.
Uncounted Covid death. Rather a lot of them.
There is also a lot of lag in the final numbers the CDC comes up with, even in “moderate” flu years. If at the end of flu year X the CDC says there have been Y deaths from flu in year X, several months into year X+1 CDC will issue “final” numbers and they may be 20% higher, 30% higher, or more.
As for the example you give, a good friend of my Mom lived alone and died of apparently a massive heart attack. Our Pastor and the police found her decomposing on the floor...
Ugh.
That happens but not in amounts that would sway the curve one way or another. I also believe in most states that any death in a home that the cause of death is required.. Autopsy.
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