Category: Coronaplague

From the country’s loudest advocates of shutting down schools… “Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too” (NYT):

After the kids go to bed, the grown-ups are drinking and smoking pot to distract themselves from the hellscape that is pandemic parenting.

The increase of substance use among parents is “just kind of understandable,” said Jonathan Metzl, the director of the department of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “This is an incredible, once-in-an-epoch stressful situation, and the kinds of outlets people usually have in their lives are just not available.” We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym, we can’t really see friends or family, and we never get a break.”

(No mention that parents in Sweden can go to the office, to the gym, and can see friends and family!)

What’s up with the drug that went from illegal to “essential” within a few years?

Many states where marijuana is legal have seen a big increase in sales since the virus began; for example, in Washington State, “cannabis revenue spiked at the height of the pandemic,” according to budget analysis from a local news radio station, KXLY. And some data from earlier in the pandemic showed that prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications were on the rise. Prescriptions for Klonopin and other similar drugs rose 10.2 percent in March 2020 from March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing statistics from IQVIA, a health research firm.

But for some parents, getting just a little stoned is the only way they can eke out a small measure of joy in an otherwise fairly hopeless time. Deborah Stein, 43, said her nightly pot gummy is the one thing allowing her to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.

She’s the mother of a 21-month-old in Los Angeles and works in the theater industry, which has been “completely decimated” by the virus, and she and her husband are worried for their future livelihood, along with the health of their families, the air quality, the election and about a million other things.

After dinner, the couple splits a “chill” gummy containing 1.8 milligrams of THC. “It’s a way of carving out this hour or 90 minutes we get to spend together, before we have to walk the dog,” Ms. Stein said. For at least that brief window, “we get to be peaceful.”

So the newspaper that, in response to a virus that kills unhealthy people with a median age of 80+, wanted schools and society shut down now complains that parenting healthy children isn’t as much as it used to be because schools and society are shut down.

Very loosely related… our young neighbor’s new puppy. Why get stoned every night when you can instead be occupied with housetraining?

Full post, including comments

We’re just coming out of what would be the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. How is Africa doing with coronaplague?

A European friend offered a theory that the countries with the highest death rates from coronavirus are those that were keeping the largest population of frail elderly people alive via high-tech health care. If you’re dependent on machines to live, he reasoned, you’re an easy target for flu or COVID-19 or any other virus.

This kind of analysis was used by some economics professors in “16 Possible Factors for Sweden’s High COVID Death Rate among the Nordics” (PDF download available for free; layperson’s summary by one of the authors). Sweden had been rather fortunate for a few years relative to its neighbors in terms of deaths among its frail and elderly. In addition to its larger low-skill immigrant population, this supersized frail/elderly population provided easy targets for the virus and may have accounted for about half of Sweden’s extra COVID-19 deaths.

Where the analysis would seem to break down is Peru. The country isn’t notable for a huge population of people on advanced life support and yet it has had a very high COVID-19 death rate (also one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns plus universal masks).

The WHO dashboard shows a lot of African countries with low death rates, even lower than one might expect given the low median age within those countries (Nigeria’s median age is 18, for example, compare to about 38 here in the U.S. (varies by ethnicity/race), 41 in Sweden, and 27 in Peru).

From my Africa pictures:

(That’s Cape Town from the sCessna 210 that my friend flew there from North Carolina. Crossing multiple oceans and mountain ranges in a 1970s single-engine piston airplane with a gasoline-filled ferry tank in the back seat is just as safe as ever, but the trip would be illegal today so as to protect everyone from the hazards of coronavirus.)

Full post, including comments

“Dynamic Change of COVID-19 Seroprevalence among Asymptomatic Population in Tokyo during the Second Wave” (medRxiv):

Objective: To assess changes in COVID-19 seroprevalence among asymptomatic employees working in Tokyo during the second wave. Design: We conducted an observational cohort study. Healthy volunteers working for a Japanese company in Tokyo were enrolled from disparate locations to determine seropositivity against COVID19 from May 26 to August 25, 2020. COVID-19 IgM and IgG antibodies were determined by a rapid COVID19 IgM/IgG test kit using fingertip blood. Across the company, tests were performed and acquired weekly. For each participant, serology tests were offered twice, separated by approximately a month, to provide self-reference of test results and to assess for seroconversion and seroreversion. Setting: Workplace setting within a large company. Participants: Healthy volunteers from 1877 employees of a large Japanese company were recruited to the study from 11 disparate locations across Tokyo. Participants having fever, cough, or shortness of breath at the time of testing were excluded. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s): Seropositivity rate (SPR) was calculated by pooled data from each two-weeks window across the cohort. Either IgM or IgG positivity was defined as seropositive. Changes in immunological status against SARS-CoV-2 were determined by comparing results between two tests obtained from the same individual. Results: Six hundred fifteen healthy volunteers (mean + SD 40.8 + 10.0; range 19-69; 45.7 % female) received at least one test. Seroprevalence increased from 5.8 % to 46.8 % over the course of the summer.

COVID-19 infection may have spread widely across the general population of Tokyo despite the very low fatality rate.

In other words, nearly half of this (masked) population came up positive for antibodies to COVID-19. That’s after excluding anyone with symptoms.

If masks are effective when used by the general public, how did the world’s most competent and experienced users of masks end up transmitting this virus to each other at these rates?

Full post, including comments

From the scientists at IHME:

By the end of December, 200 Swedes will be dying every day from coronaplague, unless they see the light and convert to the Church of Shutdown and don the hijab.

The current WHO dashboard says that 4 Swedes have died from Covid-19 in the last 7 days (0.57 deaths per day). IMHE therefore is predicting a 350X increase in coronaplague deaths.

Readers: What’s your best guess as to where the Swedes will be at the end of December?

My guess: 5-10 deaths per day. This is based on (a) Swedes being stuck indoors more, (b) Swedish Karens (even countries that give the finger to the virus must have some) who have been hiding in bunkers coming out, (c) travel picking up and therefore more people coming in from heavily plagued countries outside of Sweden, more people going from small towns to big cities, etc.

What does #Science tell us about our own country? Given that we change our minds every few weeks about shutdown policies, prediction can be more challenging. IMHE says that its projection is about 3,000 deaths per day by the end of December and it would over 6,000 if the U.S. were to give residents back what had been their Constitutional rights, e.g., to assemble.

Readers: Best guess for the U.S. daily COVID-19 deaths at the end of December?

My guess: about 700 per day… because that’s what it is right now and our shutdowns and mask policies are likely to ensure that the coronavirus always has a comfortable home somewhere in the U.S. (see When we wear masks, does the coronavirus thank us for our service?)

What else is interesting in the IHME data? 93% of Spaniards are (always) wearing masks:

(The WHO dashboard shows 453 deaths within the last 7 days. The population, 47 million, is roughly 4.5X Sweden’s while deaths are 100X never-masked Sweden’s. IMHE shows Swedish mask use at 1%.)

Follow-up: The IHME folks did pretty well in predicting the upward part of the exponential, but failed to predict that the virus would burn out, as it had in the spring 2020 wave. Here is the long-term picture:

If we zoom in, we find that I was off by a factor of 10 and IHME was off by a factor of only 2.

Keep in mind that anyone who tested positive for Covid in the 30 days prior to death was tagged by a computer as a “Covid death” and that Sweden ultimately had “less than half of Europe’s average excess death rate of 11 percent” (analysis).

What is the principal flawed assumption that resulted in my estimate being off by 10X? As there were no lockdowns, I assumed that nearly the entire Swedish population had been infected by SARS-CoV-2 in the spring of 2020 and, therefore, that those who could be killed by SARS-CoV-2 had already been killed. It may be, however, that Swedish efforts to isolate the elderly were reasonably effective and also that immunity to COVID acquired in April 2020 had already worn off by December 2020 (I would have expected immunity to last 2-3 years, which is also what people were saying about the vaccines at the time).

IHME got it wrong in the links below, but they got this one mostly right!

Related:

• Did doom visit the Swedes yesterday as planned? (May 24)
• Doom for the wicked Swedes is always three weeks away (May 3)
• “Vilified Early Over Lax Virus Strategy, Sweden Seems to Have Scourge Controlled” (NYT, September 29), which omits to note that quite a few of the Doomsaying Karens scolding Sweden all spring and summer were writing for the NYT…

Full post, including comments

In the same vein as Time to love smokers again? … “Paris Musée d’Orsay sorry for barring visitor in low-cut dress” (BBC):

Temperatures reached 26C on Tuesday, and Jeanne, an art-loving literature student, told of her desire to mark the end of a hot afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay. “It was far from my mind that my cleavage would be the subject of any disagreement,” she says.

Although her friend had a cropped top that showed her navel, Jeanne says attention was fixed on her breasts even before she had had a chance to show her ticket. “Oh no, that’s not going to be possible, that’s not allowed, that is not acceptable,” she quotes a ticket agent as saying.

If society has the energy for this, can we infer that coronaplague isn’t so bad?

Related:

• “Coronavirus: France sees ‘exponential rise’ in cases” (also from BBC, an exponential plague in a fully-masked society being strong evidence that masks for the general public can defeat any virus)

Full post, including comments

In dealing with coronaplague, Americans have taken a mechanistic view of the human body. Swab an infected human and you’re guaranteed to capture some virus, which will then be amplified by Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine and we’ll have a positive/negative result that is as reliable as if we’d checked the tire pressure on a car.

I had always thought that the main failure of humans to conform to this machine-like model was a lot of false negatives. A human is infected, but the virus does not end up on the swab. See “False Negative Tests for SARS-CoV-2 Infection — Challenges and Implications” (NEJM) and “COVID-19 false negative test results if used too early” (ScienceDaily, reported on a Johns Hopkins study).

From “Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, and his colleague Dr Tom Jefferson, a Senior Associate Tutor,” writing in that august journal of science… the Daily Mail:

And increased Covid testing is picking up dead – entirely harmless – fragments of virus as well as genuine infections. So many of the positive results we think we are getting might not be positives at all.

So Kary Mullis’s machine works as advertised, but we don’t know what we should be looking for. Thus our obsessive testing program might end up giving us millions of false positives in addition to tens of millions of false negatives.

Separately, the rest of the article is a lot of fun. American academics, ever-fearful of being canceled and cut off from the river of government cash, would never be able to write anything this harsh.

Today, our bewildered Prime Minister and his platoon of inept advisers might as well be using the planets to guide us through this pandemic, so catastrophic and wildly over-the-top are their decisions.

Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else?

Yet our PM, and his Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little experience of the job at hand, continue to behave as if they are acting on the basis of certainty.

Instead, they move from one poorly designed, rash decision to another, driven by the misguided belief that we are experiencing a ‘second wave’, following Spain’s ‘trajectory’ and just ‘behind the curve’ there.

Our latest study, out yesterday, shows that nearly a third of all Covid-19 deaths recorded in July and August might have actually been the result of other causes –cancer, for example, or road traffic accidents.

It is unfortunate that Mr Johnson is surrounded by mediocre scientific advisers.

It is strange and concerning, that the Government is still relying on mathematical modellers who have a 20-year track record of getting things wrong and have been particularly wrong in the past six months.

And the result is a confused, rudderless Government lost in a swamp of poor statistics and ill-informed recommendations.

But for now the only ‘circuit break’ we need is an end to the current cycle of bad data, bad language and shockingly bad scientific advice.

Related:

• Full range of coronaplague opinions (the Oxford team back in March)
• Massachusetts contact tracing system blown over by the first breeze

… and some photos from a 2014 trip to Oxford. Note the unmasked un-distanced sitting ducks for COVID-19:

• 

• 

• 

• 

Full post, including comments