Coronavirus

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) slow and poor response has handicapped the US fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic.   The latest example of their incompetence has cost ~8k Americans their lives including that of Colin Powell.   Since the first vaccines were given to Americans in December 2020, there were always nagging questions about how good were the vaccines’ efficacy, safety, and durability in real life.  The vaccines were developed, tested, and approved remarkably fast causing many Americans to have questions.  The correct approach would have been to collect as much data as possible afterward to determine the real-life efficacy, safety, and durability of these vaccines.  Instead of doing this, the CDC arrogantly decided that breakthrough cases (infections after being fully vaccinated) would be rare and mostly mild and would concentrate on collecting select data for serious cases that resulted in hospitalizations and deaths.  This...

We had warned two months ago that the CDC had erred in dropping the tracking of COVID-19 breakthrough cases and not doing more to track serious breakthrough cases with more detail.  This has led to tremendous confusion and bickering among the White House, the CDC, and the FDA regarding the need and timeline for rolling out vaccine boosters.  Somehow the FDA decided to ignore a lot of good data from the UK, Israel, Iceland, and Singapore regarding the seriousness of breakthroughs.  Now the CDC is leaning toward quicker and broader booster rollout.  Why? One reason is that yesterday, the CDC reported a big jump in breakout hospitalizations and deaths due primarily to the addition of one more state in their weekly report .   Based on the trend over the last 10 weeks, everyone had expected 3,400 cumulative breakthrough deaths to be reported yesterday (red curve in graph above and table below).   That they got 4,493 was probably a huge shock.   It meant th...

Russians headed to polling stations across the country this past weekend to vote in a totally new lower house of parliament.   Despite very little notice in the West COVID-19 is a driving factor in the elections and for a good reason.   The Delta variant is hitting Russia very hard.   For much of 2020, Russia claimed they had a good handle on the global pandemic and while they saw surges in cases, they reported better than average case fatality rates (CFR) of 1.6% for most of the year.   Further they claimed to have developed a vaccine, Sputnik V , that provided good protection against SARS-CoV-2 infections.   Mass distribution began in Dec 2020 near the same time as in the US.   Things worked out pretty well in early 2021 as cases and deaths dropped, but as the Delta variant began to spread in May 2021 a third and most deadly wave hit Russia.   What went wrong?   Assuming that the COVID data from Russia is of average quality (big assumption), i...

Why has Governor DeSantis spent so much time since early August pitching $2,100 Monoclonal Antibodies (MAB) as his solution for the pandemic when there are cheaper and more effective solutions such as $20 vaccines and $0.20 masks that have been used by a thousand times more people safely to reduce SARS-Cov-2 infections and deaths?   MAB does have a very useful purpose: they serve to help high-risk patients who have been infected as a second line of defense; they are expensive and should not be given as frontline defense until cheaper and more durable versions are made.    The original reason seemed to be that Governor DeSantis wanted to do his biggest donor a favor .   But now that the country has run out of Regeneron MAB and everything is backordered, and states are on allocation, he continues to complain and push a false and dangerous narrative.   Does he really think that he is fighting for the average Floridian by doing this?   Today he boasted that s...

For the first 15mo of the global pandemic, many analysts had held up Taiwan as an exemplar for how to handle a pandemic.   They had experienced only a few hundred well-monitored cases and only 7 deaths from COVID-19 for 15 months.   During this same period, Singapore also did very well.   They weren’t able to avoid infections with a high number of guest workers in a fast-growing City-State but they kept their case fatality rate low (CFR = 0.06%) due to a young population and a good healthcare system.   Japan, being a larger country with many International ties experienced all the travails of the global pandemic in 4 waves matching more or less those of the USA and the rest of the world.   They had a CFR that was near 2% - quite good for a population with high median age.   The fates of the 3 have diverged dramatically with the arrival of the Delta variant this Spring.   Taiwan’s island nation status allowed them to isolate themselves from the storm r...

The COVID-19 pandemic had been relatively mild for children in 2020.   In the early days, schools were shut and kids were sent home to learn remotely.   Later when people found out kids were not as susceptible to serious illness from SARS-CoV-2, schools reopened and in-person learning was slowly restored with strong mitigation measures instituted.   Pediatric hospitalizations (red curve in the figure below) increased last Fall but not too badly –running near 1.2% of adult hospitalization at the peak around the New Year.   L ate Spring 2021 with Delta edging onto the scene it became obvious that kids were more susceptible to this more contagious and possibly more virulent variant .   Epidemiologists warned that school reopening without strong mitigation measures could lead to disaster and yet ironically more governors and parents went the opposite direction and eased mitigations.   The end result is that pediatric hospitals were swamped and more kids suffere...

Many studies have now shown that the Delta variant is about 2.3x more contagious than the original SARS-Cov-2.  Some people suspect that it could also be more deadly but there is no clear evidence for this.  Much anecdotal evidence points to there being more young adults and kids being seriously ill and hospitalized during the latest Delta wave.  But are there more people hospitalized and dying from Delta than before?  Are cases resulting in more hospitalizations?  For the period before 6/1/21, 8.1% of all COVID-19 cases in Florida (FL) required hospitalization (CHR = Hospitalizations/Cases).  For the last 100 days when Delta began to dominate, 9.3% of all cases resulted in hospitalizations.  You may have noticed in the graph below that this trend that had brought the hospitalization rate briefly over 10% (note that the hospitalization rates are scaled at 1/10th the scale of cases) has reversed over the last 3 weeks.  The reason for this is th...