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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 3, 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 3, 2024

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 3, 2024

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51Comments

  1. 1.

    p.a.

    I’ve never understood how the RW lab leak theory was supposed to exonerate tRump; if it was an actual attack his admin’s pathetic response is even WORSE than for a naturally occurring pathogen.

    The argument is either bad faith or idiotic, or, of course, both.

  2. 2.

    bjacques

    Well, JN1 or Pirola (sounds like a Finnish pasta dish) went through NL like grass through a goose. The health ministry’s sewage index shows about double the spread over previous variants (sorry, in Dutch):

    https://www.rivm.nl/corona/actueel/weekcijfers

    2 weeks ago was my third go-round of n as many years, yet again 2-4 months after a shot. Oddly, each time the missus got similar symptoms but consistently tested negative, so maybe sensitive to viral loads below the testing threshold. We went through an armload of free RATs that I got from work.

  3. 3.

    Anne Laurie

    @p.a.: The argument is either bad faith or idiotic, or, of course, both.

    But it feels better, to the MAGAts, to insist that perfidious enemies are deliberately polluting our precious bodily fluids… than to admit that we’re always one step away from a chaotic event, and it behooves us to plan for a variety of possibilities.

    ‘Enemies’ can be wiped out, given sufficient firepower; ‘chaos’ is implacable and scary!

  4. 4.

    Narya

    One more dinner with a friend this week (early in the evening, large space, mask on public transit to/from), then isolate as much as possible til I go visit my parents next week…and mask around people.

  5. 5.

    Matt McIrvin

    @p.a.: The lab-leak hypothesis was always one of those “motte-and-bailey” arguments, where there was a respectable but boring version they put in the papers, and an indefensible but freaky version that was actually in the minds of wingnuts when they read those articles.

    In this case, the freaky version was that there was a rogue element within the government headed by Anthony Fauci that was conspiring to attack the United States with Chinese bioweapons. Since Fauci was stabbing Trump in the back, it wasn’t Trump’s fault.

  6. 6.

    Princess

    FWIW, Balloon Juice is crashing for me every time I open the front page. I was able to click this post before it crashed. Not sure which post is the problem — I suspect there is one that has a ton of links above the fold. I’m on an iPhone.

  7. 7.

    Central Planning

    @Princess: It happened to me too. I think Watergirl correlated it to some weirdness with Adam’s posts when they are on the front page.

  9. 9.

    kalakal

     

    @p.a.: That’s how I’ve always seen it too. never made any sense to me

    @Matt McIrvin: Ah, thank you. I think you’ve hit it there, that rings horribly true as authentic wingnut gibberish masquerading as logic. Makes Trump seem pretty feeble though, doesn’t it? Surely the all powerful orange one should be able to see through the scheming of lesser mortals?

  10. 10.

    Yarrow

    Has anyone seen these tests? They seem really practical.

    A friend in Spain was feeling unwell and took a covid test. The good news is it’s not covid. The bad news it is the flu.The astonishing news is Spanish covid tests are dual-Covid/flu tests and why in the hell are these not available everywhere?! pic.twitter.com/S4A3q0u9ux— David Neary (@DeusExCinema) December 29, 2023

    And in comments to that tweet is this amazing test. (Click through for picture)

    Hold my beer. This is the test we use 😎 pic.twitter.com/hwauciNvs5— Saruul Erdene (@SaruulbilegE) December 30, 2023

  11. 11.

    New Deal democrat

    Per Biobot, we currently have as many infections as we did one year ago at this time (and three years ago as well, to the extent we can trust the skimpy early sampling). In fact, only the original Omicron explosion was signficantly worse than where we are now.
     
    Also as per usual for this time of year, the Northeast (Yellow in the graph below) and the Midwest (light purple) are the worst affected regions, probably because they are the coldest regions, leading to much more indoor gathering.
     
    But if infections are just as bad as they have been for 2 of the past 3 years at this time, hospitalizations (as of last Friday’s report through December 23) are running only about 70% of last year’s levels at this time. And deaths are running at about 60% of last year’s at this time (Through the last report covering December 9). Comparing with the entire course of the pandemic, Hospitalizations are only about 30% of what they were at this time at the end of 2020, and only about 20% of what they were during the Omicron wave. Deaths are 10% or less of where they were at year end 2020 or year end 2021:

    For the 9 months starting April 1 through December 31 each year (measured by the closest reference week),
     – in 2020 there were 367,000 deaths
     – in 2021 there were 289,000 deaths
     – in 2022 there were 96,000 deaths
     – in 2023 so far there have been 39.000 deaths. This will probably rise to about 42,000 once updates are complete for the last 3 weeks of December. That’s a decline of almost 90% from the first year of the pandemic.

    Last year at this time the BA.4&5 variants were fading, as an alphabet soup of new candidates created more infections. Within a month, XBB had emerged the clear winner. XBB remained the dominant variant almost all this year. Only in the past month has it been supplanted by JN.1.

    The last variant update was 12 days ago. There won’t be another update until Friday, By now JN.1 probably accounts for about 2/3rd’s of all new infections – which would be equivalent to the entire recent surge.

  12. 12.

    glc

    I notice “CoronaHeadsUp” speaks of 2023 as a “non-pandemic year.” That is a bizarre turn of phrase from anyone paying attention.

  13. 13.

    New Deal democrat

    Well I did pick up a bug (not COVID per tests) during my holiday travels. The worst sore throat I have ever had. It felt like my lymph nodes were being stabbed with needles. But pain from eardrum to eardrum. Mild congestion, watery eyes, and occasional cough.

    Has anyone gotten an actual medical diagnosis for what this is?RSV? Strep? Seasonal flu?

  15. 15.

    Matt McIrvin

    @New Deal democrat:

    But if infections are just as bad as they have been for 2 of the past 3 years at this time, hospitalizations (as of last Friday’s report through December 23) are running only about 70% of last year’s levels at this time. And deaths are running at about 60% of last year’s at this time (Through the last report covering December 9).

    Not as low a fraction as I’d been hoping. The data from Massachusetts suggested it was more like a factor of 1/3 to 1/2, but maybe that’s just because Massachusetts is a much more vaccinated and cared-for population than the median spot in the US. (We haven’t done that great keeping up with recent boosters though.)

    I am still isolating–this infection never went much beyond sniffles for me, but I’m taking it easy and going stir crazy.

  17. 17.

    Matt McIrvin

    @New Deal democrat: Could just be COVID not yet manifesting on fast antigen tests. This time around, I clearly had had something several days before I tested positive, and watery eyes, ear and throat congestion was part of it. But there’s a lot out there.

    I didn’t get the raging killer sore throat this time, but that sounds exactly like what I felt the *first* time I got COVID just under a year ago.

  18. 18.

    Phylllis

    I’m working a few days a month through the end of this school year. I deliberately planned not to return in person until next week to let all the post-Christmas break infections make their way through the district.

    Also, that tweet about the candles with no scent is telling. A co-worker has never regained her sense of taste or smell since having the virus a couple of years ago.

  20. 20.

    sab

    A friend of my husband’s has been hospitalized for Covid, and spent a couple of days in the hall because they didn’t have an available room. This is in NE Ohio and we have lots of hospitals.

    ETA He is fully vaxed, but a smoker, over 70 and not into masking.

  21. 21.

    artem1s

    @p.a.: ​ 

    I’ve never understood how the RW lab leak theory was supposed to exonerate tRump

    IIRC it was their go to excuse for throwing out the Obama playbook on how to handle a pandemic. And because of the joint virus research that the US/China was working on – obviously it was actually secret bioweapons research dontchaknow and Obummer got pwnd. With TIFG there is almost always an agenda to discredit Obama.

  24. 24.

    Soprano2

    @Anne Laurie: I think the idea that things like Covid can just happen in the modern world is too scary for some people to contemplate, so they have to believe it was created in a Chinese lab to deliberately hurt Americans. I tell people it would be a terrible bioweapon, because for that the death toll is much too low. ETA – I agree with Matt, they also like the idea that the leading voice for Covid mitigation was actually in a conspiracy with the Chinese to bring down TFG by releasing Covid into the U.S. Of course, they can never explain why the Chinese would kill millions of their own citizens with the same virus.

  28. 28.

    Lapassionara

    Thank you, AL, for these informative posts. I was in Europe for a week in January, 2020, and I remember seeing alarming stories in the International NYT, about a mysterious disease spreading in a region of Italy that was overwhelming their hospitals. Then came the PPE shortage, and people dying after going to choir practice, and Trump claiming it would be gone by Easter. What a nightmare.

  30. 30.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: Some of the more paranoid versions speculated about the virus being specially engineered to kill white people and spare Asians, which I guess just involved ignoring the fact that that was obviously not happening.

  31. 31.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Matt McIrvin:

    In this case, the freaky version was that there was a rogue element within the government headed by Anthony Fauci that was conspiring to attack the United States with Chinese bioweapons. Since Fauci was stabbing Trump in the back, it wasn’t Trump’s fault.

    Yeah, that makes sense for about five seconds, like most RW ‘logic.’  Fauci or no Fauci, if this was an attack, the RW response from the get-go was to oppose any defense.

  32. 32.

    New Deal democrat

    @Matt McIrvin: Thanks. FWIW, just tested again. Still negative.

    Fortunately (crossing fingers and hoping not to jinx myself) it seems to be abating.

  33. 33.

    New Deal democrat

    @Soprano2: Thanks. Although runny nose and occasional cough usually don’t occur.

    I like the fact that it usually resolves by itself in 3 to 5 days though!

  34. 34.

    hrprogressive

    Another year, another boatload of uncertainty.

    Still haven’t caught it that I’m aware of yet. Person I still live with is now back in an office setting 4x a week, but they’ve been going back to said office 2x a week since last July and haven’t yet brought it back, so.

    It’s just tough because I absolutely still don’t want to get it if I can help it, but, like.

    People like T. Ryan Gregory are right in the sense that that graph is pretty telling, but he’s also part of the Zero Covid community who have gone out of their way to predict the COVID Immunity Zombie Apocalypse for the last several years, and while I understand they are coming from a place of concern which I do appreciate, their most dire proclamations have been about as accurate as the 5G Towers of Vax Death people on the right. So…

    Anecdotally I know multiple family members living much closer to 2019 lives than I am who indicate to me they haven’t caught it yet either, so.

    I’m not saying it isn’t out there, and there aren’t pockets where it is very prevalent…but it just doesn’t seem like it’s January 2022 when Omicron was literally felling everyone who wasn’t taking precautions / remaining pretty isolated. It just isn’t.

    I understand governments have stopped giving a shit, and 95% of society has stopped giving a shit too, but some people need to better examine the levels of risk, and/or stop cherry-picking old reports and data to suggest scenarios (“50M disabled or more!!”, for example) that just aren’t coming to pass.

    Thanks for continuing to do these, it’s one of the only sources of semi-reliable information left, barring going hunting for people on the social media disapora since Twitter shit the bed.

  35. 35.

    TBone

    Anecdotal but the gut microbiome stuff rings very true for me.  I started drinking kefir and taking fiber supplement (until allergic reaction to new brand of fiber burned my lips off with inflammation). I think there’s a whole world of hurt we don’t understand (or are disregarding) with regard to repeat Covid infections.

  36. 36.

    Matt McIrvin

    @hrprogressive: Among my circles this wave is basically everywhere, seems if anything more prevalent than the first Omicron wave–but I know from available public data that that’s not true; in terms of pure infection this is about on the level of last winter’s XBB wave.

    I think it’s because most people I personally knew (unlike the median American) locked themselves down tight during the first Omicron wave but now had their guard down.

    I have some friends who are way into the Zero Covid community and some of the sources they link to seem like they’re gradually peeling loose from reality, implying that this wave is going to be the deadliest one ever or something close. Going by all the actual numbers I can find… no, it’s not. Not even close.

  37. 37.

    frosty

    @Baud: OT you have a great deadpan delivery that makes it through texts. I can count on at least one laugh a day. This was one of them.

    Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

  40. 40.

    lowtechcyclist

    @New Deal democrat:

     – in 2020 there were 367,000 deaths
    – in 2021 there were 289,000 deaths
    – in 2022 there were 96,000 deaths
    – in 2023 so far there have been 39.000 deaths. This will probably rise to about 42,000 once updates are complete for the last 3 weeks of December.

    What source are you using?  I’ve been using Worldometer all along, and the first two 9-month periods are pretty close between Worldometer and your source, but the last two, not so much.

    I’d like to play with the numbers a bit, but using Worldometer and comparing to yours would be apples and oranges.

  41. 41.

    Matt McIrvin

    @lowtechcyclist: I’ve been mostly looking at Massachusetts state numbers to do historical comparisons because I trust them more than anything more widely aggregated. Of course I don’t believe “case counts” any more even here, except as an indication of cases bad enough to require some kind of medical attention. But the comparison of wastewater counts vs. hospitalizations and deaths is interesting, and tells the story of a fairly widespread but less-severe wave.

  42. 42.

    WV Blondie

    A long-time family friend just died of COVID in CT. I don’t know for sure, but she likely never got vaccinated (one of my late mother’s friends – they were John Birch-type Republicans long after the JBS had passed it’s heyday). I mourn and rage simultaneously.

  45. 45.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WV Blondie: One of my aunts died of COVID back in 2021. We weren’t close, but from her politics I suspect she might have been unvaccinated, despite being in a very vulnerable group.

    If people won’t be convinced that some simple action can help protect them, there’s not a lot you can do. But there’s no better example that bad ideas can kill.

  47. 47.

    WV Blondie

    @Matt McIrvin: Agreed! I find myself relieved that my mother died years before COVID – she’d begun finally getting disillusioned with the teabaggers, and I think she’d have disdained Trump as a low-class scumbag – but at least I never had to try to sway her undying allegiance to the rest of the GQP. (When she was younger, she fell for a lot of conspiracy theories, which explains her JBS membership.)

  48. 48.

    AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team

    Thank you so much for these posts. Invaluable and something I don’t see anywhere else.

  49. 49.

    lowtechcyclist

    @New Deal democrat:

    Thanks!  No, the period isn’t the problem, you were clear about comparing the 4/1 – 12/31 periods for each year, and I was mimicking that on Worldometer.

  50. 50.

    RaflW

    New (Jan 3 byline) Scientific American article says that having had a series of Covid vaccinations before first contracting Covid does appear to significantly reduce the risk of Long Covid.

    Lead off with the startling note that over 200,000,000 people are believed to be in that miserable camp. Ugh.

    One meta-analysis of 24 studies published in October, for example, found that people who’d had three doses of the COVID vaccine were 68.7 percent less likely to develop long COVID compared with those who were unvaccinated. …

    A study published in November in the BMJ found that a single COVID vaccine dose reduced the risk of long COVID by 21 percent, two doses reduced it by 59 percent and three or more doses reduced it by 73 percent. Vaccine effectiveness clearly climbed with each successive dose. “I was surprised that we saw such a clear dose response,” says Fredrik Nyberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden…

    I have read that of course even for Vax’d people, one can suffer Long Covid on second (or subsequent) infection. But I hope this data also correlates to improved protection from dread LC for, say, a person who’s 6X shot up & has had Covid once between doses 4 and 5. Hmmm.

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