Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024
There is a (fortunately, minor so far) measles outbreak in Philadelphia, confirmed cases in New Jersey, and warnings of a possible carrier in Virginia. (Responses to the Dulles Airport news seem to be evenly divided between ‘who cares, it’s just a rash’, and ‘Probly some filthy dark-skinned illegal immigrant’, predictably.) There’s also been a rather larger outbreak reported in England. Measles is an *extraordinarily* virulent disease that kills at least a million people a year — not all of them children in underdeveloped nations — and which also causes immune response suppression. Welcome to our new, post-pandemic era!


COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024 1

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024 3
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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024 2

… In a turnaround from 2020’s strict stay-at-home protocols, students can now go to class even if they test positive for the virus, according to a message from the OUSD COVID Response Team.

COVID-positive students no longer have to stay home, as long as they do not have any symptoms, according to district officials. Asymptomatic, COVID-positive students should wear a mask at school while indoors, the response team added.

“The updated guidance moves towards a more symptom-based approach to COVID-19, similar to guidance for other illnesses. Most important to note, the new guidance removes the recommendation for a 5-day isolation period following a COVID-19 positive test,” the team wrote.

Wearing a mask at school is optional for staff members and students. The Oakland Unified School District dropped its masking mandate in April of 2022, allowing individuals to make their own choice…

California Department of Public Health officials said impacts from COVID are reduced, compared to prior years, because of “broad immunity from vaccination and/or natural infection, and readily available treatments for infected people.”

CDPH’s current guidance is “focused on protecting those most at risk for serious illness, while reducing social disruption that is disproportionate to recommendations for the prevention of other endemic respiratory viral infections.”…

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: January 17, 2024 4
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Reader Interactions

52Comments

  3. 3.

    RedDirtGirl

    I tested positive on Sunday. Had cold and flu-like symptoms, but no sore throat, so didn’t expect it to be Covid. Pretty mild case so far, thankfully.

  6. 6.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Observations from my unfortunate encounter with COVID over the holidays:

    1. It didn’t have many of the symptoms that have served as warnings in the earlier waves; no fever, no negation of taste sensation, just coughing, fatigue, body aches, sore throat (and in my case, not even those last two).
    2. It was absolutely connected to a holiday gathering. When you’re with family and friends, your caution levels tend to be lower than when you’re out and about in a public setting.
    3. Severity can vary greatly. My better half was flattened for the better part of a week, while my symptoms were fully obscured by jet lag and a minor winter cold I’d picked up just before travelling. Also, my tests went negative within a week, while it took almost two weeks for her to finally test negative.

    Probably we’ll learn more as time passes, just because this disease hasn’t been in existence long enough for any solid knowledge of long-term effects.

  7. 7.

    Matt McIrvin

    There’s some nasty norovirus-like puke-inducing stomach infection going around–my daughter has it, some of my friends and coworkers’ families do too. Nothing for it, as far as I can tell, but to stay hydrated and ride it out.

  9. 9.

    Matt McIrvin

    That Canadian graph reveals the thing that’s really worrying me: within 10-20 years, 100% of the human population will have Long COVID, and there’s probably no way to stop it. You’re going to have it, I’m going to have it.

    I’m trying to figure out what that means. Originally I was worried it meant severe ME/CFS which would mean our civilization is going to collapse–everything would just stop working and we’d starve to death because nobody would be able to get out of bed. But I don’t think it means that.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: Will you be adding measles to your repertoire, AL?

    Don’t intend to, nope!

    Just generally bummed out at how many *potential* pandemics are bubbling just below the surface (like avian influenza, H1N1, which is what first started me watching pandemic news back in the 1990s).  Globally, we (humans & other species) are ever more interconnected, ever more stressed, ever more vulnerable to new infections… and the collective reaction has been “Nope, gonna stick our fingers in our ears & insist none of this is happening…”

  11. 11.

    Anne Laurie

    @Matt McIrvin: I’m trying to figure out what that means.

    Probably about what happened after the *last* Great Epidemic: Some not-insignificant portion of the global population will never quite live up to their expected potential. A small minority of sufferers will be permanently incapacitated, and either abandoned to overburdened families or warehoused.  Within a decade — barring some new scientific breakthroughs, which I’m actually hopeful about! — the whole topic will have been memory-holed from ‘polite’ conversation.

    There are millions of people today living with AIDS, and many dying of it, but it’s mostly vanished from the media…

  13. 13.

    chrome agnomen

    the Delthia Ricks tweet about brain damage lasting up to 18 months after infection clearly shows that covid is no where near as dangerous as conservatism.

  16. 16.

    eclare

    I guess that is the silver lining of the cold and snow here, no one is going out in public places.

  20. 20.

    Princess

    @Matt McIrvin: My reaction to the Canadian graph was different — I’m not convinced it shows what it claims to prove — that multiple infections themselves lead to long covid. If (say) one in ten infections lead to long covid, then a person who has had six will be more likely to get one leading to long covid than a person who has had one, without the *cause* for the one who has had six being the fact of those previous five. I don’t think this graph proves the causal relationship it claims. I find it totally fishy tbh.

    i’ve had a bunch of friends with long covid and it’s truly awful. I don’t personally know anyone who got it since omicron variants became dominant. These are anecdotes, not data.

  21. 21.

    Anyway

    @Anne Laurie:

    There are millions of people today living with AIDS, and many dying of it, but it’s mostly vanished from the media…

    Ads for HIV drugs are prevalent.

  22. 22.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Matt McIrvin: I think we are still too early on the curve for the models to have much meaning behind illustrating hypotheticals scenarios. The self-reporting criterion alone makes for a huge selection bias skewed toward those w/ more noticeable symptomatic infections, & possibly the more vulnerable (& thus more vigilant about testing) cohorts. It does not control/adjust for vaccination status, either. Also, some Long COVID symptoms have a more significant socio-economic impact (not to mention on an individual’s quality of life) than others.

    Nevertheless, it is clear that risk of Long COVID goes up w/ successive infections, it just may not be quite as dramatic as the Canadian model might suggest. One should still make whatever effort one deems affordable (from a socio-economic POV) to avoid infection as much as possible.

    This is why it is never a good idea to just let a new pathogen rip w/o mitigation measures, even if there are vaccines that are effective against hospitalizations & deaths. At one point, the PRC’s “Dynamic Zero COVID” policy seemed to mitigate against the unknown socio-economic risk of Long COVID, but it was never sustainable when the ROW had given up all NPI measures, the virus had evolved to be as transmissive as it is, & the PRC cannot survive as a hermit kingdom. Now, like everywhere else, in the PRC COVID is mostly out of sight / out of mind for most people most of the time, especially those w/o elderly parents or young children.

  25. 25.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Princess: It looks like what it means is that there’s some significant probability per-infection of coming away with long-term effects, and it doesn’t go *down* with repeat infections. It’s like rolling the same dice every time.

    I got it at the beginning of 2023 and at the end of 2023, which says to me that absent 2020-type self-quarantine, which I can’t manage because I’m not allowed to work from home 100%, and I have a family and I can’t control what they do, I’m probably going to get roughly one COVID infection every season. So that’s the frequency of my dice rolls.

    The question is just what those long-term effects are. A lot of these definitions of “long COVID” can be really expansive–any kind of debilitation lasting more than a couple of weeks.

  26. 26.

    New Deal democrat

    Good news (relatively speaking) from both the CDC and BIobot’s updated wastewater reports. As expected, both peaked right after New Year’s. The CDC shows a slight (5%) decline from peak, while Biobot shows a more substantial 15% decline  Mind you, that decline only takes us back to mid-December and is more than 3x the pre-Thanksgiving level. The two reports are way divergent as to regional levels. Biobot shows declines in  3 regions, especially the Northeast and Midwest, but not the West, which never really had much of a wave. By contrast, the CDC report shows a sharp increase in the West, a possible peak in the Northeast, and declines in the South and Midwest.

    Hospitalizations continued to increase slightly in the first week of January to 36,800, about 20% below the peak exactly one year prior. The best (again, relatively speaking) news is that deaths, as of the week of December 16, *declined* slightly to 1,653, vs. almost 3,200 in the same week one year ago. If this pattern holds deaths will probably not exceed 2,000 in the next few reports before declining.

    For all of 2023, there were a little under 75,000 deaths, an 85% decline from the first two years of the pandemic. The large majority of these continue to be elderly people, but even there the rate is only 50% of one year ago.

    No update on variants until this Friday. JN.1 will probably be about 75% of all infections at that time.

    I continue with masking precautions in indoor Publix spaces until this wave is past. And as noted in earlier comments, there are at least two other nasty bugs currently circulating. I’m trying not to catch the intestinal bug either! (Too late for the throat infection, already did that one).

  27. 27.

    Geo Wilcox

    @Anne Laurie: And it isn’t just the human species that has to worry. An outbreak of H5N1 killed 96% of the seal babies in the sub-Antarctic this summer. They do not know how the adult population fared as there were none on the beaches. Just dead seal pups and gulls (which probably gave the pups the virus) eating them. It killed a polar bear last week and lets not get into how many billions birds are dead and how many species on the edge could be pushed over.

     

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/mass-seal-deaths-antarctic-southern-atlantic-south-georgia-bird-flu-aoe

  29. 29.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The China National Statistics Bureau just published the death registration data for 2023. It shows ~ 1.1M excess deaths compared to the average of the previous 5 years. However, the number of deaths in the PRC has been slowly trending up, as the post-1949 baby boomers start to die off, so using the 5-yr avg. as baseline probably overestimates excess deaths a bit. OTOH, the exit tsunami started in early Dec., so there were deaths at the end of 2022, as well, though the vast majority would have occurred from Jan. 2023 on. The 1.1M falls w/in the range of different models proposed, though some have guesstimated as high as 1.6 – 2.5M excess deaths.

    Yes, there as a massive baby boom after the CPC seized power in 1949, part of the peace dividend following a century of unrelenting civil wars, foreign invasions & generally poor governance capacity at all levels. The PRC’s population increased by ~ 80% from 1949 – 1979, & life expectancy by 60%, despite the devastating famine during the Great Leap Forward & the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution. The bulk of that baby boom generation have now retired & started to pass.

  31. 31.

    satby

    @Matt McIrvin: Had it before Thanksgiving so missed dinner with the family. Would have thought it was food poisoning, but my daughter in law had it the week before. I didn’t get it from her because I hadn’t seen her in several weeks. Fortunately, it was a two day thing only, the third day I was fine.

  34. 34.

    Ohio Mom

    @matt: I suspect pulling bad teeth is a very old technology. Now obviously there were no antibiotics for most of human history so there must have been a fair amount of “The operation was a success but the patient died” (or is that the other way around?).

  35. 35.

    Ohio Mom

    @Matt McIrvin: I had Covid in November 2022 and December 2023 and am also wondering if this is going to be an annual occurrence.

    The second bout was a lot milder than the first and the Paxlovid was more effective as well. Two data points hardly make a trend but I am hoping.

  36. 36.

    frosty

    @Matt McIrvin: ​The graph is for infections, not years, so not quite as dire. It shows ~100% chance of Long COVID at 20 infections. I’ve had one in four years, so 80 years? My crazy nephews have had two, so they’ll get it within 40 years.

    Still too high. 12.5% probablility after one infection is scary high.

  38. 38.

    CliosFanBoy

    My wife had COVID over Christmas. The Paxlovid worked great; her fever dropped from 102+ to <100 overnight.  She had not yet gotten the latest booster.   I had it last Spring and took Paxlovid.  Neither of us had a “rebound.”   Fortunately, I had the latest booster, and my wife will get caught up with hers when her doctor gives the OK. (Apparently, you’re not supposed to get the booster right after you recover from a bout of COVID.)

     

    FWIW, anti-vaccine people are either stupid as hell, smart but gullible as F., or evil.

  41. 41.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Ohio Mom:

    there must have been a fair amount of “The operation was a success but the patient died” (or is that the other way around?).

    That’s how my father always said it.

  42. 42.

    lowtechcyclist

    Sunday, January 21, will be the fourth anniversary of AL’s first post about the “Wuhan coronavirus.”  Starting January 30, 2020, her Covid updates were daily or almost daily.

  43. 43.

    bluefoot

    That “vaccine will make you have a baby with someone else’s DNA” is pretty mind boggling. I’m impressed at the level of conspiracy mindedness that something like that requires. I mean, it’s not even remotely possible.

    What worries me about COVID is that I suspect that in 10-plus years, we’ll see a lot of early onset cognitive impairment/decline as a result of prior COVID infections. Granted, I’ve spent a lot of my career working in neurological diseases so have a bias, but the long COVID data and data on infections possibly being linked to neurological diseases makes me a little alarmed.

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    @frosty: Yeah, but I’m assuming roughly 1 infection per year absent perpetual pandemic protocols for the rest of our lives, which most people are not going to take. That’s just based on personal experience.

  45. 45.

    Matt McIrvin

    @CliosFanBoy: My impression from the studies that have been done is that “Paxlovid rebound” is really COVID rebound–people have rebounds after feeling better whether or not they took Paxlovid. I think I was experiencing that last time around myself, actually.

  46. 46.

    Matt McIrvin

    @bluefoot:

    That “vaccine will make you have a baby with someone else’s DNA” is pretty mind boggling. I’m impressed at the level of conspiracy mindedness that something like that requires. I mean, it’s not even remotely possible.

    Racism makes you stupid in very special ways.

  47. 47.

    TooManyJens

    That top tweet suggests, delightfully, that killing off English kings at age 15 ensured the survival of the human race.

  48. 48.

    brendancalling

    Vaccinated and boosted, and tested positive last night. This time is worse than omicron—which I also got despite V&B, back in 2021. Since I work in the school district, I had to email my principal, fill out 2-3 forms, and email all the teachers I’d been in close contact with. I also had to alert my bandmates (we played a show Friday, and who knows if I was already carrying).

    Fucking covid sucks

  51. 51.

    Paul in KY

    The King dropping dead at age 15 was Edward VI (only legitimate son that survived longer than 3 months of Henry VIII). Died of tuberculosis. Last year was very rough for him. Forced to undergo Middle Ages quack cures (that did not work).

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