Coronavirus

Florida just reported 110k new COVID-19 cases for the past week – nearly equal to the all-time high we had predicted Florida will set by early August.   FL continues to lead the USA higher in COVID-19 cases although Texas Governor Abbot is trying very hard to catch up by banning mask and vaccine mandates .   The Delta variant is so ferocious even CA and NY are seeing exponential growth as are nearly all 50 states in the USA.   But Florida continues to lead and may be a harbinger for what will happen to the USA in August. There are several reasons why Florida is doing so well in this race to the bottom: 1.      FL has been very welcoming to all variants since Governor DeSantis removed all local COVID-19 mitigations on May 3 . 2.      FL stopped daily reporting and possibly tracking of COVID-19 cases on June 3 – suggesting the pandemic is over. 3.      The Governor stopped responding to the COVID-19 crises even as cases began to rise 7 weeks ago and shifted his focus to his potenti

T he CDC in the USA continues to lag the best-in-class by requiring minimal genetic testing and tracking of COVID-19 cases compared to the UK or Israel.   This has led to slower identification and monitoring of COVID variants and how mutations can change their infectiousness and speed of spread.   To date, the CDC monitors only a limited sample of those who are fully vaccinated and have serious hospitalizations and deaths, dropping their initial request for states to monitor all “breakthrough” cases.   This data is only voluntary - passive reporting by the county health departments that decide to participate.   This has led to erroneous conclusions about the speed and seriousness of the current COVID-19 Delta surge. One very bad statistic that is often quoted is this: As of July 12, of the more than 159 million fully vaccinated people in the USA only 5,189 were hospitalized and 1,063 died from COVID-19.  The conclusion is that only 0.0033% of those fully vaccinated will get seriousl

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began a year and a half ago, there has always been a debate about how serious COVID-19 really is compared with common seasonal flu which kills tens of thousands each year.   Even after more than 600,000 Americans have died and as cases are soaring again the hope is that the death rate in the USA will not be as bad now that half of all Americans have been fully vaccinated.   The coincident death rate (daily deaths divided by daily new cases) allows us to gauge how deadly a disease is but it has several shortcomings principally due to the fact that deaths lagged infections by a couple weeks as hospitals and doctors struggle to save patients’ lives.  As reported death counts have an additional problem since some counties and states take several weeks to fully record and report the cause of death.  But since reported death rates are a convenient measure of disease severity and effectiveness of treatment we proposed to use a lagged case fatality rate (CFR = dai