Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus (& H5N1) Updates: May 1, 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus (& H5N1) Updates: May 1, 2024

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Bowing to the — hopefully temporary! — inevitable.

Katherine Wu is always an excellent read, and this (IMO) is a good summary of the current status of H5N1 infection in the United States [gift link]:

… Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s alertness to infectious disease remains high. But both federal action and public attention are focusing on the wrong aspects of avian flu and other pressing infectious dangers, including outbreaks of measles within U.S. borders and epidemics of mosquito-borne pathogens abroad. To be fair, the United States (much like the rest of the world) was not terribly good at gauging such threats before COVID, but now “we have had our reactions thrown completely out of whack,” Bill Hanage, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me. Despite all that COVID put us through—perhaps because of it—our infectious-disease barometer is broken.

H5N1 is undoubtedly concerning: No version of this virus has ever before spread this rampantly across this many mammal species, or so thoroughly infiltrated American livestock, Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me. But she and other experts maintain that the likelihood of H5N1 becoming our next pandemic remains quite low. No evidence currently suggests that the virus can spread efficiently between people, and it would still likely have to accumulate several more mutations to do so…

During this outbreak, experts have called for better testing and surveillance—first of avian and mammalian wildlife, now of livestock. But federal agencies have been slow to respond. Testing of dairy cows was voluntary until last week. Now groups of lactating dairy cows must be screened for the virus before they move across state lines, but by testing just 30 animals, often out of hundreds. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he would also like to see more testing of other livestock, especially pigs, which have previously served as mixing vessels for flu viruses that eventually jumped into humans. More sampling would give researchers a stronger sense of where the virus has been and how it’s spreading within and between species. And it could help reveal the genomic changes that the virus may be accumulating. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies could also stand to shift from “almost this paternalistic view of, ‘We’ll tell you if you need to know,’” Osterholm said, to greater data transparency. (The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Testing and other protections for people who work with cows have been lacking, too. Many farm workers in the U.S. are mobile, uninsured, and undocumented; some of their employers may also fear the practical and financial repercussions of testing workers. All of that means a virus could sicken farm workers without being detected—which is likely already the case—then spread to their networks…

In other ways, experts told me, the U.S. may have overlearned certain COVID lessons. Several researchers imagine that wastewater could again be a useful tool to track viral spread. But, Sosin pointed out, that sort of tracking won’t work as well for a virus that may currently be concentrated in rural areas, where private septic systems are common. Flu viruses, unlike SARS-CoV-2, also tend to be more severe for young children than adults. Should H5N1 start spreading in earnest among humans, closing schools “is probably one of the single most effective interventions that you could do,” Bill Hanage said. Yet many politicians and members of the public are now dead set on never barring kids from classrooms to control an outbreak again…

The intensity of living through the early years of COVID split Americans into two camps: one overly sensitized to infectious threats, and the other overly, perhaps even willfully, numbed. Many people fear that H5N1 will be “the next big one,” while others tend to roll their eyes, Hanage told me. Either way, public trust in health authorities has degraded. Now, “no matter what happens, you could be accused of not sounding the alarm, or saying, ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Jeanne Marrazzo told me. As long as infectious threats to humanity are growing, however, recalibrating our sense of infectious danger is imperative to keeping those perils in check. If a broken barometer fails to detect a storm and no one prepares for the impact, the damage might be greater, but the storm itself will still resolve as it otherwise would. But if the systems that warn us about infectious threats are on the fritz, our neglect may cause the problem to grow.

***********

The Great Pandemic Winding Down continues, for the moment. I’ll keep posting every week while we all wait to see what happens next…

The Biobot Analytics wastewater data shows rates of infection continuing to drop at a steady rate.

======

How soon we (choose to) forget:

… Zhang Yongzhen, a virologist, said in an online post on Monday that he and his team had been given a sudden eviction notice from their lab, and guards had barred him from entering it over the weekend. The post, published on Weibo, was later deleted, Associated Press (AP) reported.

After extensive media and social media coverage, on Wednesday Zhang said he and his team had been “tentatively” allowed to resume work inside the lab.

“I would like to sincerely thank all the netizens and people from all walks of life who have supported me and my team for a long time,” he said on Weibo…

Zhang published his scientific findings about Covid-19 without government approval in January 2020. He and his team have since been subject to a series of setbacks, demotions and oustings, of which the eviction appears to be the latest.

The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said in a statement that Zhang’s lab was closed for “safety reasons” and renovations. It said Zhang’s team had been given alternative lab space.

However, Zhang said the offer was not made until after his team was evicted, and that the new lab did not meet the team’s required safety standards…

The move shows how the Chinese government continues to pressure and control scientists, seeking to avoid scrutiny of its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

After sequencing the virus on 5 January 2020 Zhang and his team initially sent a notice to Chinese authorities warning of its potential to spread. The next day his lab was temporarily shut down by China’s top health official.

Foreign scientists called for Zhang and other Chinese scientists to be allowed to publish the sequencing. The following week Zhang published his sequence – without authority – allowing global health authorities to begin testing for Covid-19, finding that it was spreading outside China. It also kickstarted the development of tests, vaccinations and other pandemic measures.

Internationally Zhang was lauded, receiving prizes in recognition of his work, but domestically he came under pressure. He was barred from collaborating with some former research partners and removed from his post at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention…

Zhang’s team appeared to receive a lot of public support on Weibo, where related hashtags were viewed by tens of millions of Chinese. “How can the country develop if we treat scientific researchers like this?” one said.

Some article links appeared to have been removed since they were posted but extensive discussion of Zhang’s dispute with the Shanghai health authority remained online on Tuesday afternoon.

======

Terrible news, as far as I’m concerned:


Ricks has been my personal go-to pandemic aggregator for a long time. She’s gotten sideswiped by Elon’s minions a couple times before, so this might be a temporary situation… or the poor woman might just decide that she’s been a target for long enough. Yes, I checked BlueSky… she’s got an account there, but it’s not very active (yet):

Long Covid taste loss may not involve taste buds. New
study attempts to untangle taste and olfactory dysfunction 1 year after infection www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/lo…

[image or embed]

— delthia ricks science writer (@dricks.bsky.social) Apr 26, 2024 at 7:52 AM

======

Unpaywalled version, via Stripes:

… Fauci, who helped steer the Trump and Biden administrations’ efforts to fight the virus, is scheduled to testify June 3 in front of the House Oversight select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, with lawmakers expected to press him on the still-unknown origins of the pandemic, the government’s vaccine mandates and other issues that remain politically divisive, more than four years after the outbreak began.

The GOP-led panel includes some of Fauci’s most persistent critics in Congress, such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-La.) and Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who have repeatedly alleged that the pandemic began with an accident at a lab in China funded by Fauci’s agency and covered up by U.S. officials.

“Retirement from public service does not excuse Dr. Fauci from accountability to the American people,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the panel, said in a statement. “On June 3, Americans will have an opportunity to hear directly from Dr. Fauci about his role in overseeing our nation’s pandemic response, shaping pandemic-era policies, and promoting singular questionable narratives about the origins of COVID-19.”

Fauci has denied wrongdoing, and public health leaders have praised his work and said Republicans have unfairly targeted him…

“The select subcommittee has not uncovered any evidence that directly implicates Dr. Fauci and [former National Institutes of Health director Francis] Collins in a coverup of the pandemic’s origin or collusion with scientific journals to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (Calif.), the panel’s top Democrat, said at a hearing last week…

But public confidence in Fauci and other health officials deteriorated amid frustrations about pandemic-era policies such as remote schooling and attacks from GOP lawmakers. Fifty-three percent of Americans in April 2022 said they trusted Fauci’s recommendations on coronavirus vaccines, down from 68% in December 2020, according to polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization. The dip was driven by growing Republican skepticism; just 25 percent of Republicans said they trusted Fauci’s coronavirus vaccine recommendations in April 2022, down from 47 percent in December 2020, while Democrats’ trust in Fauci remained largely unchanged.

After leaving government in December 2022, Fauci joined the Georgetown University faculty as a distinguished professor and wrote a memoir set to publish in June…

So, maybe Fauci can expense this sideshow as part of his book tour on his next tax return. (Me, I’d drop trou and give the Repubs the full moon, but that’s why Fauci was a government official and I’ll never be one.)

Somewhere around 12% of the U.S. population—virtually all of them Republicans—saw the tremendous success of the COVID vaccines and decided to become *less* supportive of mandatory MMR vaccination for children in public school.

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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) Apr 21, 2024 at 7:04 PM

Reader Interactions

15Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    But public confidence in Fauci and other health officials deteriorated amid frustrations about pandemic-era policies such as remote schooling and attacks from GOP lawmakers. Fifty-three percent of Americans in April 2022 said they trusted Fauci’s recommendations on coronavirus vaccines, down from 68% in December 2020, according to polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization. The dip was driven by growing Republican skepticism; just 25 percent of Republicans said they trusted Fauci’s coronavirus vaccine recommendations in April 2022, down from 47 percent in December 2020, while Democrats’ trust in Fauci remained largely unchanged.

    I wonder if it were Dems that lost confidence in someone, the loss would still be attributed to the “public.”

  3. 3.

    TBone

    During the worst of the political shit storm in this small college town, I was very uplifted to see many signs and images of support for Dr. Fauci.  A lot of thank you Dr. Fauci in our hearts here!

  4. 4.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The CPC regime really prefers the domestic population forget its crimes & failures. We have seen the Anti-Rightest Campaign, the mass killings associated w/ land redistribution, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the handling of the SARS outbreak, the early handling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, the COVID-19 exit tsunami. That is when you know the regime has admitted to itself that the policy mistakes were horrendous & the crimes indefensible. Even for the failures that the regime openly acknowledge as grave mistakes, such as the GLF & the GPCR, it would prefer everyone to forget & move on.

  5. 5.

    New Deal democrat

    Both Biobot and the CDC showed continued declines in wastewater particles as of their latest reports. The former is down 85% from its Holiday peak, and the latter 90%. Just as significantly, a further decline of only 1% will put the CDC measure equal to its all time lows.

    Hospitalizations made an all time pandemic low last week of 5,615. This compares with over 35,000 early last January and over 150,000 at the Omicron peak.

    Deaths as of March 30 were 648, only higher than last June and July. If they follow wastewater levels and hospitalizations, they will also set an all time pandemic low under 500 when April’s data is fully reported.

    Now that we have four full years of data on COVID deaths, here is what each year looks like:

    4/1/20-3/31/21 504,000
    4/1/21-3/31/22 433,000
    4/1/22-3/31/23 128,000
    4/1/23-3/31/24 64,000

    There have been successively fewer deaths each year. The same is true of hospitalizations.

    In a typical flu season, there are 35:000 deaths +/-10,000. If the trends continue, COVID 19 will have a similar mortality to the flu in about 2 years.

    I am cautiously hopeful that is where we are headed. Because every single variant in the past 2+ years has been a descendant of the original Omicron BA.1 strain – including BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, BA,5, XBB, JN.1, and the newest variants, KP.1&2.

    Speaking of which, there had been concern that KP.1&2 would spark a new wave. As of last week, the CDC’s latest variant update showed that they made up about 1/3rd of all new infections, with no sign of an upturn yet.

  7. 7.

    Matt McIrvin

    “The curse of the 95%” is really the result of Omicron. During development of the COVID vaccine we were generally warned not to expect too much. What we got instead was something that seemed almost miraculous, for about a glorious half a year, then Omicron came along and knocked the vaccine back to something about consistent with what we’d been warned to expect in the first place (well, maybe a little better than that–it’s genuinely great at preventing deaths). But in the meantime, the Biden administration had naturally seized on the vaccine as their political salvation. And the fact of Omicron was what gave power to things like DeSantis’s assertion that “the government lied about the vaccine’s effectiveness”, etc.

    I think that if Trump gets back in and turns the US into a totalitarian hellhole, if there are any historians left afterward, they’ll point to that disconnect as the thing that did it. The moral is not to bet against Darwin–that virus is always mutating.

  8. 8.

    NorthLeft

    Thanks again Anne for this important information and an even more important opportunity to share and vent.

    Up here in Canada, governments are pretty much bypassing any opportunity to look back on the pandemic response and to prepare for the next one. A notable exception is Alberta who have appointed a well known COVID sceptic and anti-vaxxer to lead their review.

    I am sick and tired of people saying “Well, at least we now know that we can’t ever shutdown everything (HA!) again.”
    The revisionists are making sure their voices are heard, and that the truth is well buried.

  9. 9.

    Scout211

    NBC  The WHO overturned dogma on how airborne diseases spread. Will the CDC act on it?

    The World Health Organization has issued a report that transforms how the world understands respiratory infections like Covid, influenza and measles.

    Motivated by grave missteps in the pandemic, the WHO convened about 50 experts in virology, epidemiology, aerosol science, and bioengineering, among other specialties, who spent two years poring through the evidence on how airborne viruses and bacteria spread.

    However, the WHO report stops short of prescribing actions that governments, hospitals, and the public should take in response. It remains to be seen how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will act on this information in its own guidance for infection control in health care settings.

    While it may seem obvious, and some researchers have pushed for this acknowledgment for more than a decade, an alternative dogma persisted — which kept health authorities from saying that Covid was airborne for many months into the pandemic.

    Specifically, they relied on a traditional notion that respiratory viruses spread mainly through droplets spewed out of an infected person’s nose or mouth. These droplets infect others by landing directly in their mouth, nose, or eyes — or they get carried into these orifices on droplet-contaminated fingers. Although these routes of transmission still happen, particularly among young children, experts have concluded that many respiratory infections spread as people simply breathe in virus-laden air.

    “This is a complete U-turn,” said Dr. Julian Tang, a clinical virologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who advised the WHO on the report. He also helped the agency create an online tool to assess the risk of airborne transmission indoors.

    . . .

    Whereas the WHO report doesn’t characterize airborne viruses and bacteria as traveling short distances or long, the CDC draft maintains those traditional categories. It prescribes looser-fitting surgical masks rather than N95s for pathogens that “spread predominantly over short distances.” Surgical masks block far fewer airborne virus particles than N95s, which cost roughly 10 times as much.

    Researchers and health care workers have been outraged about the committee’s draft, filing letters and petitions to the CDC. They say it gets the science wrong and endangers health. “A separation between short- and long-range distance is totally artificial,” Tang said.

    . . .

    In response to the outcry, the CDC returned the draft to its committee for review, asking it to reconsider its advice. Meetings from an expanded working group have since been held privately. But the National Nurses United union obtained notes of the conversations through a public records request to the agency. The records suggest a push for more lax protection. “It may be difficult as far as compliance is concerned to not have surgical masks as an option,” said one unidentified member, according to notes from the committee’s March 14 discussion. Another warned that “supply and compliance would be difficult.”

    The nurses’ union, far from echoing such concerns, wrote on its website, “The Work Group has prioritized employer costs and profits (often under the umbrella of ‘feasibility’ and ‘flexibility’) over robust protections.” Jane Thomason, the union’s lead industrial hygienist, said the meeting records suggest the CDC group is working backward, molding its definitions of airborne transmission to fit the outcome it prefers.

  10. 10.

    TBone

    @Scout211: having suffered through the Lyme Wars, I am completely unsurprised.  Still completely pissed, but in an unshocked way.

  11. 11.

    sab

    My local Walgreen’s had N95 masks for sale, 2 boxes for the price of 1. So apparently they did try to do the right thing in stocking them. At Ace I have to order them on line.

    I am having a much better allergy season this year by masking up.

  12. 12.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Latest development is that Zhang & his team regained temporary access to their labs, while their case is being assessed at higher levels. Probably means the international scrutiny is kicking the decision much further upstairs.

  13. 13.

    dc

    Unfortunately, Delthia Ricks is not on Mastodon (but Eric Topol is). Biden is on Threads, their accounts can be followed from Mastodon. I wish BlueSky would do the same.

  14. 14.

    soapdish

    @Matt McIrvin: It looks to me more like Delta was the issue, as Omicron didn’t really become prevalent until late 2021.

    Still, the 95% figure actually was correct given the information we had at the time. Unfortunately, the situation on the ground changed. That a-hole COVID skeptics treat this as a lie is pathetic.

  15. 15.

    Bill Arnold

    @Scout211:
    Is this the WHO report(technical document) in question? (Changing the vocabulary seems to be a way around admitting fault for bad recommendations early in the COVID-19 pandemic.)
    This new document seems decent, though I haven’t read all 52 pages (at work atm). Good news.
    Global technical consultation report on proposed terminology for pathogens that transmit through the air (18 April 2024)
    (pdf: Global technical consultation report on proposed terminology for pathogens that transmit through the air)

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