Biden administration extends COVID public health emergency https://t.co/NUbhecuw7E
— Herb Scribner (@HerbScribner) January 11, 2023
… Across the country, health officials have been trying to combat misinformation and restore trust within their communities these past few years, a period when many people haven’t put full faith in their state and local health departments. Agencies are using Twitter, for example, to appeal to niche audiences, such as NFL fans in Kansas City and Star Wars enthusiasts in Alabama. They’re collaborating with influencers and celebrities such as Stephen Colbert and Akbar Gbajabiamila to extend their reach.
Some of these efforts have paid off. By now, more than 80% of U.S. residents have received at least one shot of a covid vaccine.
But data suggests that the skepticism and misinformation surrounding covid vaccines now threatens other public health priorities. Flu vaccine coverage among children in mid-December was about the same as December 2021, but it was 3.7 percentage points lower compared with late 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The decrease in flu vaccination coverage among pregnant women was even more dramatic over the last two years: 18 percentage points lower.
Other common childhood vaccination rates are down, too, compared with pre-pandemic levels. Nationally, 35% of all American parents oppose requiring children to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, and rubella before entering school, up from 23% in 2019, according to a KFF survey released Dec. 16. Suspicion swirling around once-trusted vaccines, as well as fatigue from so many shots, is likely to blame.
Part of the problem comes down to a lack of investment that eroded the public health system before the pandemic began. An analysis conducted by KHN and The Associated Press found local health department spending dropped by 18% per capita between 2010 and 2020. State and local health agencies also lost nearly 40,000 jobs between the 2008 recession and the emergence of the pandemic…
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The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that the XBB.1.5 Omicron sub-variant of COVID-19 may be spurring more cases. https://t.co/jwgYhTYEeI
— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) January 12, 2023
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Some 900 million people in China have been infected with the coronavirus as of 11 January, according to a study by Peking University.
The report estimates that 64% of the country’s population has the virus.
It ranks Gansu province, where 91% of the people are reported to be infected, at the top, followed by Yunnan, (84%) and and Qinghai (80%).
A top Chinese epidemiologist has also warned that cases will surge in rural China over the lunar new year.
The peak of China’s Covid wave is expected to last two to three months, added Zeng Guang, ex-head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control…
Official data shows five or fewer deaths a day over the past month, numbers which are inconsistent with the long queues seen at funeral homes and reports of deaths on social media.
In December Chinese officials said they planned to issue monthly rather than daily updates on the Covid situation in the country.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said China, which stopped reporting Covid fatalities from Tuesday, was heavily under-reporting Covid deaths.
In response, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin stressed again at a regular press briefing on Thursday that Beijing has been sharing Covid data in “a timely, open and transparent manner in accordance with the law”, having held technical exchanges with the WHO over the past month.
International health experts have predicted at least a million Covid-related deaths in China this year. Beijing has officially reported just over 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began, one of the lowest death rates in the world.
3 billion journeys. That's how many trips were taken in China in 2019 before the pandemic began.
After the end of COVID restrictions, fears are growing over a surge of cases in China's vulnerable rural areas this Lunar New Year. https://t.co/ODHUYpoIG6 My piece in @torontostar
— Joanna Chiu (@joannachiu) January 11, 2023
Got my booster today- the new CanSinoBio inhaled vaccine. Super easy, basically comes in a milk tea cup, you inhale, hold it, exhale- done. No taste really. Should improve vaccine rates here, and the efficacy is supposed to be decent. pic.twitter.com/7GuWFZni3m
— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) January 11, 2023
A furious argument is unfolding in China over the reversal of the government’s strict "zero Covid" policies and the massive virus surge that followed. The online debate is challenging the Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative. https://t.co/ZQzXNpyl1u
— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) January 11, 2023
I strongly suspect the Instagram ‘influencer effect’ isn’t limited to China…
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It’s a business — for some people, it’s a living — and pretending Covid is over will skew how their followers act, unfortunately.
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This policy — testing travelers coming from China to gather data on #Covid viruses circulating there — seems more productive than other approaches, ie requiring a negative test to travel. This provides a window into what's circulating in China. https://t.co/pDFfWiQXr4
— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) January 10, 2023
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Huh, look at this, research that was touted by the lab-leakers as dangerous helps us to understand more that might be done to protect against SARS-CoV-2.https://t.co/OwCfg6Eu3D
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) January 12, 2023
From a longer thread:
What's keeping the US from relying on wastewater data instead of clinical case data for population-level Covid counts?
After all, testing is patchy and wastewater testing is comparatively cheap and simple, right?
My latest for @statnews: https://t.co/pbJ3gxiA3w
— Brittany Trang (@brittanytrang) January 11, 2023
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Of note, younger individuals may not be aware of clinical comorbidities that put them at increased risk of these serious outcomes, which makes vaccination all the more important in this population.
— Dr. Robert M. Califf (@DrCaliff_FDA) January 12, 2023
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Good news: In the Northeast where the XBB.1.5 variant now accounts for >75% cases, hospital admissions among seniors have mostly started to declinehttps://t.co/MOQpgmNWGl pic.twitter.com/85pPdIa63q
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 12, 2023
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Many people don't realize that on April 1, 2020, Governor DeSantis issued an executive order to restrict activities within the state to those deemed as essential services … a lockdown. But a few months later, it went like this. pic.twitter.com/8AIWbtgkKk
— David Willson (@DavidWillson) January 13, 2023
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Reader Interactions
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NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
68 new cases on 01/10/22.
108 new cases on 01/11/22.
113 new cases on 01/12/22.
It’s going to be a long winter…
Matt McIrvin
We’re definitely on the downslope of the winter XBB.1.5 wave here, but we probably haven’t seen the peak of deaths yet. Still seems to be somewhere around 1/4 the size of last winter’s wave by most metrics. As a person who never showed any obvious signs of COVID infection, whose last booster was way back in the early fall, and whose child has near-term travel plans, I am still being extra careful.
Amir Khalid
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health reported 383 new Covid-19 cases yesterday, for a cumulative reported total of 5,031,826 cases. 381 of these new cases were local infections; two new cases were imported. It also reported four deaths, for an adjusted cumulative total of 36,905 deaths – 0.73% of the cumulative reported total, 0.74% of resolved cases.
20,781 Covid-19 tests were conducted yesterday, with a positivity rate of 2.6%.
There were 11,126 active cases yesterday, 246 fewer than the day before. 495 were in hospital. 20 confirmed cases were in ICU; of these patients, eight confirmed cases were on ventilators. Meanwhile, 625 more patients recovered, for a cumulative total of 4,983,795 patients recovered – 99.0% of the cumulative reported total.
The National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) administered 12,059 doses of vaccine on 12th January: 173 first doses, 110 second doses, 1,136 first booster doses, and 10,640 second booster doses. The cumulative total is 72,646,908 doses administered: 28,123,209 first doses, 27,534,635 second doses, 16,288,389 first booster doses, and 700,675 second booster doses. 86.1% of the population have received their first dose, 84.3% their second dose, 49.9% their first booster dose, and 2.1% their second booster dose.
YY_Sima Qian
Since the China CDC is only reporting COVID-19 data on a monthly basis, there is virtually no visibility into the state of the pandemic. Judging from anecdotes from personal contacts & Chinese social media posts, the exit tsunami has largely subsided in terms of infection. Stories about hospitalization & deaths seems to have subsided, as well. Different provinces in China are reporting that visits to fever clinics in rural areas have been falling. Local authorities are also sending out periodic surveys to the population to obtain data on infections & recoveries.
China approved Molnupiravir at the end of Dec., & 1M boxes are expected to arrive before Chinese New Year.
In the meantime, a juvenile & imbecilic pissing contest has developed between China & South Korea/Japan. I was wondering why China had singled out these two countries, & has not retaliated against other countries (the US, some EU countries, Taiwan, Australia, etc.) that have implemented PCR testing requirements for arrivals from China (pointlessly performative though they may be). It appears that South Korea had suspended issuing short term visas to Chinese nationals from 1/1, for 1 month. Arrivals from China are also required to put on a yellow badge as they are paraded through the airport for their arrival screening. Anyone testing positive is sent to centralized quarantine for 7 days. Japan had also suspended visas to Chinese nationals, & implemented similar policies for arrivals from China, only they are required to put on red badges. I don’t think any other country that is screening Chinese arrivals have implemented such measures. Both South Korea & Japan have limited the number of flights to & from China. In retaliation, China has suspended issuing visas to South Korean & Japanese nationals.
In case anyone is wondering, current Chinese policy for overseas arrivals is negative PCR test w/in 48 hrs of departure, & a health declaration upon arrival. No screening upon arrival, & therefore no possibility of any quarantine. The negative PCR requirement prior to departure is pretty useless, but at least it is applied to all arrivals. I would prefer China test & sequence waste water on all international flights, as the US is planning to do.
In stark contrast to South Korea & Japan, SE Asian countries are welcoming Chinese arrivals w/ open arms. Chinese nationals were by far the largest cohort of inbound tourists to all of SE Asian nations before the pandemic, & was still growing fast. The SE Asian countries seem to want to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, Japanese tourism & hospitality industry is putting pressure on the Japanese government to rescind the visa suspension for Chinese nationals, & the latest headlines suggests that Japan has indeed resumed issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens. The pissing contest between China & South Korea may still be escalating.
Sometimes I despair for humanity…
As of 1/12, 3,487.638M vaccine doses have been injected in Mainland China, an increase of 1.569M doses in the past 24 hrs.
On 1/12, Hong Kong reported 8,260 new positive cases & 71 new deaths. There have been 12,693 total COVID-19 deaths to date.
On 1/12, Macau reported 16 new cases & 4 new deaths. There have been 106 total COVID-19 deaths to date.
On 1/12, Taiwan added 21,737 new positive cases & 53 new deaths. There have been 15,755 total COVID-19 deaths to date.
New Deal democrat
Biobot updated yesterday, and it was quite a surprise: COVID levels declined sharply nationwide and in all 4 regions, to levels below those at any time since Thanksgiving. The usual caveat that sometimes this is revised over the next week, applies.
Confirmed cases have also declined sharply, by near 20,000 since last weekend, to 57,000. Regionally they have risen in the South, are steady in the Northeast, and falling in the Midwest and West. NY, NJ, southern New England, FL, BC, SC, VA, KY, AL, and PR are the hardest hit jurisdictions, while the northern Mountain States, the Dakotas, and OR are the lowest.
Hospitalizations have also declined over 10% from their peak one week ago to 41,400. Deaths meanwhile rose to a nine month high (bar one day) of almost 600 on Wednesday, and are now 575.
It will be interesting to see what is happening regionally when the CDC updates its variant nowcast later this morning. Is XBB the majority of cases even in areas like the West which have seen no major winter outbreak? In the meantime, recall that in both of the last two winters, the seasonal peak of COVID cases was between January 10 and 15, after the last Holiday get-togethers were over. If in the face of XBB, our winter wave has been this low in comparison to previously in the pandemic, we are truly approaching what endemicity will look like.
BretH
What I find especially disturbing is that if you subscribe to the idea that vaccines are actually killing hundreds (thousands?) of people daily or are causing rare cancers you also have to believe that all the doctors that recommend vaccinations, all the research agencies, all the insurance companies are sociopaths who either don’t care that they are killing people or are secretly in favor of it.
I casually check on a site run by someone I knew as a not crazy person decades ago (peakprosperity.com) who started out warning about unsustainable debt but now is pretty much full-on ivermectin / vaccines killing people / government plot / global cabal new world order etc etc.
I had an account there and after many times pointing out the flaws in their reasoning I was banned as a “low fidelity poster”.
Ken
They meant in the audio sense, I’m sure, but the older sense of “faithful (to our cultish beliefs)” fits better. Consider it a badge of honor.
NorthLeft
My wife and I successfully made it through the holiday season. We interacted freely with family, even though I know a few of them are careless and are not fully vaccinated. We still don’t go to public events, but received a couple of gifts to a local theatre and to a Toronto FC game.
The play is at the end of January and the soccer match is in September. We will attend both…dog willing.
I am struggling to understand how a mask and a safe vaccine (all of them) can cause so much angst and division.
YY_Sima Qian
On a more personal note, my wife’s grandfather has now tested negative & has been released from the hospital! Big sigh of relief! The husband of one of my aunts was hospitalized on Tuesday. Things were a bit worrying for a couple of days, but his condition seems to have stabilized. He is on a non-invasive ventilator, but not in ICU. Not out of the woods, yet.
rikyrah
Thank you for all the information, AL.
rikyrah
@YY_Sima Qian:
🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾 for your family..
PAM Dirac
@BretH:
Since all these people are getting vaxxed you also have to believe that all these people are willing to die for the “cause”. The deniers really are sad, pathetic people.
OzarkHillbilly
You should frame that and hang it on your wall.
OzarkHillbilly
It’s not masks and vaccines driving the angst and division, it’s the RW grievance mongers pushing their fears.
YY_Sima Qian
China’s population is ~ 60% urban. w/ the number of provinces (mostly inland ones that have even lower urbanization rate than the national average) reporting 80 – 90% of population having been infected in the exit tsunami, I am not sure the Chinese New Year will indeed bring a significant new wave, unless it is caused but XBB.1.5. Not that we can tell given the way China is reporting, or not reporting, data now.
gene108
@YY_Sima Qian:
I’m not sure how accurate COVID data is anywhere these days. In the U.S., ready availability of home tests means fewer COVID cases get reported to health agencies.
kalakal
@YY_Sima Qian: Good to hear!
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: I checked our local sewer surveillance Web site; both plants are still low, especially the large plant that serves most of our city. Surprisingly low, actually. I don’t know how they test for Covid, or if it matters which variant is more prevalent. As for the problems with using wastewater to measure Covid, I can’t think of a better way to get so much information in such an easy manner that doesn’t depend on people’s cooperation. I hope it continues; I know they’ve been using it to detect drugs for decades. The stuff about breaking it down by zip code, though, is never going to happen; there isn’t one outfall for a certain zip code, and the labor involved in collecting samples by zip code would be substantial. They need to start thinking about it in new ways.
Soprano2
@gene108: That’s why the data collected from wastewater is probably the best information we have; it doesn’t depend on anyone to take a test or cooperate in any way. It doesn’t cover everyone, but in a given area it covers enough to give you a good idea of how prevalent Covid is in that area.
Matt McIrvin
@BretH: The Trump era revealed a lot of dangerously lunatic ideas in people I’d previously thought just had refreshingly original takes, not to be dismissed. And the COVID pandemic just intensified that.
tobie
The odd thing is all I’m seeing on my Google news feed are articles from the NYTimes and CNN saying that Moderna didn’t disclose everything to the FDA (very likely) and the new vaccine is no more effective than the old vax. The factoid not included is that vaxxing still diminishes the risk of severe infection. Also unclear: is the failure to disclose related to the bivalent booster or to a newer version?
All in all: the NYT & CNN are feeding antivax paranoia with opaque reporting that leaves way too much space for false inferences.
Betty
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if the multiple early deaths I am hearing about lately, folks in theirs in their early 50s, are related to Covid cases. In at least one case of a family member, he did have a bad case of Covid before he died. Much more likely to be Covid than the vaccine in any case.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty: I remember Kieran Healy’s analysis of US excess deaths in the early COVID pandemic showed really clear waves of deaths attributed to diabetes and circulatory diseases that exactly followed COVID infection rates.
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: Eric Topol specifically thinks the article those stories are based on is wrong and better data shows the bivalent booster IS more effective. (This is actually a change from his previous position on the subject based on more recent papers.) It’s interesting to me since I’d thought the idea that the bivalent booster was really no better than the previous ones was becoming accepted wisdom.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: XBB ripped through Singapore before it hit here, and as I recall it was a similar pattern to the northeast US–it seemed to have a lot of immune escape but impacts from the wave turned out to be relatively light.
But the one caveat I have is that the ratio of hospitalizations to wastewater count seems to be higher than for the big Omicron wave. That’s hospitalizations, not ICU hospitalizations. When I brought this up before, YY_Sima_Qian had a theory that that had to do with the biology of XBB, but I suspect it’s simpler than that, it’s just that the 2021-22 Omicron wave completely saturated the hospitals and they couldn’t take in people with less grave cases, whereas they are taking them now.
tobie
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not endorsing what the NYT & CNN are saying. Paul Offitt published a piece in the NE J of Med yesterday questioning the effectiveness of the new vax and whether folks should get it, and it’s prompted headlines like this which will hurt the drive to get folks vaccinated:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-01-11/bivalent-covid-boosters-offer-no-extra-protection-studies-suggest&ved=2ahUKEwjdz56a4sT8AhWpHkQIHR6lC90QxfQBKAB6BAgIEAI&usg=AOvVaw2jUl1YJF1MB880idMD8k3t
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: Yeah, Topol says Offitt has been opposed to boosters on grounds he considers specious for a long time, and implies that he’s selectively fitting recent results into that prejudice. I’m concerned that it’s a kind of soft antivaxxerism getting laundered through the scientific community, though maybe that is too strong a description.
Amir Khalid
@Matt McIrvin:
Funny that XBB has been all over Singapore, but (per the Malaysian Ministry of Health) has not been detected here.
New Deal democrat
The CDC has now updated its variant surveillance data. While XBB&.1.5 are over 40% of cases nationwide, there continues to be huge regional variations. In the Northeast they are 80%, Mid-Atlantic 50%, Southeast and central South 25%-30%, and in all other regions less than 20%, with BQ%1.1 still the majority of cases. In other words, *much* slower progress by XBB than originally thought.
@Matt McIrvin: I think your theory is correct, i.e., that Omicron simply cverwhelmed hospitals, which were forced to turn away less grievously ill patients.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: It hasn’t been a major player in China, either, provided we can trust their variant counts enough to say that. Maybe this has something to do with Singapore’s unusual guest-worker population? That certainly affected their previous COVID waves.
jonas
Here in central New York, the local paper is reporting a doubling of Covid-related hospitalizations over the past two weeks. Still nothing close to what we had at this time last year during the big Omicron wave, but concerning. The culprit — a pitifully low bivalent booster uptake rate, particularly among seniors.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: XBB is immune-evasive but not that transmissible, w/ worse fit for hACE2 receptors than BA.5.2 & BF.7 that took off in China during the exit tsunami, XBB.1.5 is both immune-evasive & transmissible. There are domestic XBB.1.5 cases reported in Hong Kong & China now, probably many more unreported. We will see if XBB.1.5 can cause a significant new wave of infections here, so soon after virtually everyone has been infected w/ BA.5.2/BF.7.
TKH
@Matt McIrvin: There is a recent episode of This Week in Virology where Offit explains his thinking. Keep in mind that Offit is a vaccinologist and Topol a cardiologist who not only claims expertise in vaccines but also in artificial intelligence for medical applications. Color me skeptical on both.
There are studies in cell culture using pseudovirus, a common harmless virus with engineered SARS spike, showing no difference between bivalent and monovalent boosters. Then there are more recent studies, also in cell culture, using SARS CoV virions. These show differences between monovalent and bivalent boosters. How either of these studies relate to the a tion in infected people is the feal and very hard question as it appears to be really difficult to construct cohorts to answer the question cleanly and with statistical significance.
Johnny C. Lately
@tobie: I have no idea where anybody is getting “booster’s not effective” information… it seems clear as day to me
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-bivalent-vaccine-booster-outperforms
Bill Arnold
@Betty:
Yep. The mRNA vaccines reprogram some cells in the arm into making spike protein. The virus infects cells in many organs in the body, reprogramming them to make whole virus, including spike protein.
There were heart malfunctions and inflammation being observed in COVID-19 patients at elevated rates all through 2020, when vaccines were not available. Antivaxxers are, knowingly or not, invoking time-travelling vaccines as the culprit. (Causal hypotheses not consistent with available data/observations are generally considered dubious.)