dan11295

It is not going to magically go away. What is the most likely scenario is over time natural+vaccine immunity along with longer term virus evolution, will gradually turn Covid from a virus with relatively high mortality into an endemic virus (like the other 4 common coronaviruses) with generally mild effects. A few years from now you may catch it but you wont need to get tested for it nor is it likely to send you the hospital, even if you are older. Nor will we need to restrict social activity to keep hospitals from being overburdened/prevent significant excess mortality.

This would be about 200-300 deaths/day (We have never dropped below 500-550/day since last March). Or course just getting the numbers down that low doesn't mean anything by itself, the UK was average <10 deaths/day during last summer. Ultimately you need herd immunity to finally move beyond the pandemic phase. I am hopeful we are there by late spring/early summer (seasonality/vaccination combo). What next winter looks like is a bit of a guessing game. I am sure there will be some Covid around, Variants with additional immune evasion are possible. But thankfully should not be anything like this past winter.

It has now been a year now since the first deaths were reported in Washington State. There is no question people just want to start living their normal lives again. Believe me I want to as well. I just hope these states aren't "jumping the gun" by opening too much while we are still in winter and before the J&J vaccine really gives us the vaccine push we need. I do feel the risk of another spike is low though. By the way, last IHME update no longer implies any jumps in cases due to variants, and shows a steady case decline.

Positivity rates are still dropping, that's whats more important. The raw case/test numbers were just up a bit due to Texas backlog and holiday last Monday,

Part of the reason Wilson never acknowledged it was likely to avoid impact on morale as we were involved in WWI at the time. Also a lot of reporting on it in the U.S. was suppressed. It is generally referred to as the "Spanish" flu was because the country was neutral during the war so the press wasn't under as much restrictions.

No one is going to mandate masks for the seasonal flu. The masking orders were issued as an emergency response measure. Once Covid moves into its post-pandemic phase (hopefully by summer with enough vaccinations) there is no reasonable justification for continuing with emergency rules issued for the purpose of controlling the pandemic.

Numbers have stopped dropping nationwide, but last week was depressed due to both Monday holiday and the weather (Texas especially). Will need to wait until next week to see if its a real trend.

The J&J single shot will significantly accelerate the vaccination process. I agree I am also getting tired about hearing about every new "variant". That all generally have similar mutations anyways. Last CDC update now shows over 600k excess deaths in the past year. Worst states per population: NY (State), NJ, MS, AL, AZ (All >0.25% of population). 0.35% in NYC. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid This a a good site that aggregates available worldwide excess mortality data. Shows that trying to compare countries based on official numbers alone can be ill advised. Good evidence of significant under counting in many places due to either lack of testing (e.g. Mexico), collapse of health care infrastructure (e.g, Ecuador), stricter criteria for classifying deaths (Russia), or likely suppression of data (Belarus, Egypt, Uzbekistan).

I would agree on rate of decline being likely to slow down. Selection pressure is going to really start to favor any more transmissible variants, plus more restrictions are started to be relaxed. Been keeping an eye on Europe. France/Italy have had cases stabilize and numbers are starting to go back up in central Europe. The UK Variant is believed to be a factor in that, particular new spikes in places like Czech Republic. Am still watching Florida as a bit of a bellwhether here in the U.S. given their apparent higher percentage of the variant compared to other areas of the country.

The good news we are at the point where a good percentage of the most at risk of hospitalization/deaths have at least had 1 dose of the vaccine. Even if another spike occurs mortality rates should be lower. Additionally, new therapies are in late stage trials which may further reduce mortality. Finally getting results of clinical studies with Ivermectin which do suggest benefit there(not just reports of hospitals having success in a non-quality controlled setting). With hospitals less under strain you can target new therapies, even if their supply limited, to higher percentage of patients. That said we are not out of the pandemic phase of this until we get herd immunity, The virus will certainly become endemic (like the four common coronaviruses), but vaccines in the short-medium term, new treatments, and likely long term tendency of the virus to become less pathogenic over time as it mutates will eventually turn it into a nuisance bug and not much else down the line. We still have to get to that point, unfortunately.

When you look at the per capita numbers, you can clearly see the areas of the country that have done well and not so well. Not so well: NY Metro and Northeast (NY/NJ/CT/MA/RI), Deep South (LA/MS/AL), Dakotas (ND/SD), AZ Done well: Geographically isolated (AK/HI), Northern New England (NH/ME/VT), Pacific Northwest (WA/OR), VA/NC/UT. (Note: Utah is a somewhat special case with an average age of almost 4 years younger than any other state, I suspect that is a factor in their lower mortality rate)

Also, while there is lower mortality for those <65 who are healthy, it still has a higher mortality rate than the flu for anyone over 25. Not to mention plenty of younger healthy people either end up hospitalized or have medium/long term effects.

I had brought up the potential under counting in Ohio a little while ago. It is likely other states will be reviewing data going forward (or are doing it now, this is the likely reason for such bad numbers out Alabama lately)

Some of these "deaths following the vaccine" are due to the fact you have millions of people 65+ getting the vaccine in a relatively short period of time. Normal mortality among the elderly is going to result in deaths shortly after getting the vaccine which have nothing to do with the vaccine itself. Then you have the cases of anaphylaxis which do occur (they occur with flu vaccines as well). From what I have read the rate of these reactions is not significantly higher that with the flu vaccine, it is just its much more noticeable due to large numbers involved and the fact every case is being made a big deal. You don't hear stories on the news about deaths following flu vaccination, even though it does happen. The one "grey area" is adverse effects of the 2nd dose, which as mentioned about can be significant. That said in general the risks associated with getting Covid are much more than the risks of getting the vaccine.

If its good data peak winds/gusts should appear in the TCR from the NHC. Might just have to wait for that if they are now permanently withholding the data for some reason, even though they released the Laura data after 30 days.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.06.21251159v1 According to this preprint, the B.1.1.7 variant accounts for ~2.5% of all U.S .cases as of the end of January. You have to remember that exponential growth takes time to really become noticeable. The original virus was likely in places like NYC in early February. We know it was in Italy and Iran prior to the first reported Cases in Wuhan. It took several weeks to a couple of months with no mitigation in place for cases to really take off. Per the paper, Florida seems to have a higher percentage of variant cases than other states (~5%) with it expected to become the dominant variant there by early March. If variant spread does indeed trigger another cases spike, it should occur there first based on the paper.

There will always been a group that will deny anything, just like there are people that deny AIDS, the moon landing, etc. There is no question when everything started in January, a lot of regular people though this would go the way of SARS, MERS or at worst the swine flu. They assumed with modern medicine and better access to information you would never see another epidemic in this country with this level mortality in a short time frame. In reality we just got lucky with the 3 cases I mentioned. SARS didn't spread unless someone was already fairly sick, MERS has a low transmission rate and the swine flu had a much lower mortality rate than Covid.

When you compare the numbers on state dashboards compared for actual death certificate data reported by the CDC via the National Center for Health Statistics, some states have noticeably higher numbers reported by the CDC. Ohio (15,900 CDC vs 11,500 state) Kentucky (5,020 CDC vs 3,920 state) Missouri (8,318 vs 7,688) Nebraska (2,433 vs 1,952) Oklahoma (5,393 vs 3,681) Wisconsin (6,804 vs 5,992) are some notable examples. OH and OK stand out in particular (40% undercount???). CDC now shows 550k all cause excess mortality since last year.

7-day average has begun falling and this decline should accelerate shortly. Cases are continuing to drop sharply. Today was barely above last Sunday (weather may be impacting that a bit, but trend is still clear.)

So far is appears the key ones (UK/SA/Brazil) all seem to share the same key 1 or more mutations. SA and Brazil seems very similar, closer to each other than the UK one. Evidence suggests that these mutations are developing independently or each other. Which would make sense as I don't think there is that much travel between Manaus and SA. Vaccines still appear to be effective enough against them so far. IF we start getting further mutations which decrease the vaccine effectiveness, especially the ability to prevent severe disease, then you have a problem. The latter has NOT happened yet, as far I I know.

3.3" here

0.8". will see if snow growth improves with better echos.

Steady very light snow here, finally getting saturation it seems.

first small flakes here

FYI The website that has been linked regarding the HCQ and Ivermectin has had their Twitter account banned for over a month. They appear to be misrepresenting the conclusions of at least some of the referenced studies. e.g: https://c19study.com/mitja.html There was a 25% reduction in hospitalization and 16% reduction in the median time to symptom resolution for HCQ, without statistical significance due to small samples. (bolded mine) Site also goes to length to hide any affiliations. Notwithstanding, obviously it is important that research on potential treatments continue. Numbers are continuing to go in the right direction. Deaths I expect to start dropping in earnest this week. Should be <2000/day in 3 weeks. Still much too many of course, but will take time to get there.