(Boston)
The empty city: Photos from a city deserted between March 17 and July 4, 2020 #covid19 https://t.co/js12zhJh1Z pic.twitter.com/wLtRieVftg
— Adam Gaffin (@universalhub) March 18, 2023
We’ve reached the stage where the big tsunami wave has rolled back, and we’re picking through the rubble looking for survivors and whatever we can scavange. Excellent summary of our current moment:
"It’s a really stupid idea to schedule the end of a #pandemic, because viruses don’t have Outlook calendars. Having said that, it is reasonable to suggest that we need to prepare for the next phase."https://t.co/4ZsVwxDLkG
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 24, 2023
More on USA state-by-state #COVID19 death rates.
"When adjusting the data to acct for age & comorbidities, AZ saw the highest COVID death rate (581 deaths per 100,000 people) in the nation. WaDC (526 /100,000) & NM (521/100,000) were the 2nd & 3rd worst."https://t.co/PPviVQoUfX— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 25, 2023
Another knock-on effect that will haunt us for years:
Before @WHCOVIDResponse is dismantled, important to recover/repurpose unspent #COVID $ to launch Operation Warp Speed 2.0: next gen vaccines w/ broader/long lasting immunity. Improved vaccine platforms prepare us for the next pandemic. @WHOSTP @ASPRgov @BARDA @HHSGov @ashishkjha https://t.co/4ZrcWm0umX
— Rick Bright (@RickABright) March 25, 2023
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.@WHO's vaccine advisers, the SAGE, recommends countries focus Covid booster efforts on high-risk people. Of medium & low risk people, they are saying to countries: Boost them if you want, but prioritizing other health spending may make more sense. https://t.co/hQ5ArRqocf
— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) March 28, 2023
More updates on XBB.1.16 aka #Arcturus
-It has already spread to 20 countries
-Total Sequences: 629
-Apart from India, rapid growth is seen in the US, Japan & NSW
-A new child of it-XBB.1.16 has already emerged & designated:
XBB.1.16.1 = XBB.1.16 + Spike T547I. 1/ pic.twitter.com/KctbHZobw7— Vipin M. Vashishtha (@vipintukur) March 25, 2023
What a difference a year makes… now China seems to want to totally "disappear" COVID. Neighbor with covid-like systems saying she can't find covid-related medicine in pharmacy, and work won't let her take days off (tho she'll be required to work in isolated room). https://t.co/RxWhm07Aks
— tbCh (@blackChinahand) March 24, 2023
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India has been witnessing a gradual increase in coronavirus infections in recent days. A new variant could be driving the rise. https://t.co/a1VY7bWLXt
— DW News (@dwnews) March 28, 2023
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United Kingdom:
The presenter also said that some people said lockdown saved thousands of lives but others said it was a great infringment of civil liberties & what did I think.
I said both things are true – but some countries with beter public health response managed to avoid lockdown. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/2lAasAY2Yn
— Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 (@chrischirp) March 26, 2023
I in 40 for England. pic.twitter.com/EakKX4SG09
— Conor Browne (@brownecfm) March 27, 2023
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Update: SARS-CoV-2 data from China CDC related to samples collected in Huanan Market in Wuhan, China are available again on @GISAID https://t.co/5UFisyB0aa
— Maria Van Kerkhove (@mvankerkhove) March 28, 2023
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Brings this piece to mind and that we need to markedly accelerate and quadruple efforts for effective treatments. Much too little is being done.https://t.co/X4B0k6ubDm#LongCovid https://t.co/Z1R7ztmZTI pic.twitter.com/hTh6hmDwQd
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) March 27, 2023
LONG COVID 🧵:
Clips from today's @IndependentSage from world leading experts. PLEASE WATCH!1. @EricTopol We know a LOT MORE now about how Long Covid manifests in people & physiological mechanisms (loads) BUT are FAR BEHIND on finding treatments. Signifcant pandemic legacy 1/9 pic.twitter.com/kqrT2gAg2T
— Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 (@chrischirp) March 24, 2023
David Quammen is always worth reading. Here’s a gift (unpaywalled) link:
… We owe it to raccoon dogs, after all they have suffered from humans, not to incriminate them prematurely. Even if they did carry the coronavirus into the market, and spilled it into a person or two, they weren’t there by choice, after all. The vast commerce in wild animals that carried those miserable raccoon dogs to Wuhan goes far beyond China, bringing wild creatures in many countries — and the viruses they carry — increasingly into close contact with humans. And although that traffic might please the palates of some consumers, it’s a recipe for pandemic.
The new international analysis is dramatic, but solving the origin question definitively could take a long time. Forty-one years passed between the first known outbreak of Marburg virus (a cousin of Ebola) in humans and the discovery of its animal host. For SARS-CoV-2, we might never know, given how much precious evidence and opportunity for collaborative research have already been lost.
Whatever happens, raccoon dogs are now a central part of the investigation — as Holmes told me, three years ago, that he suspected they should be. Their presence at covid’s ground zero serves to remind us that spillovers of dangerous viruses from wild animals into people happen often and all over the world, sometimes inconsequentially, sometimes causing catastrophe. And, if our longtime abuse of this suddenly famous creature led to a pandemic, we have only ourselves to blame.
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Trump's mismanagement of the gov’t response and dismissiveness of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic cost at least 130,000 American lives—according to his own COVID-19 adviser Dr. Deborah Birx. And the disruptive effects on the education of our young people were devastating. pic.twitter.com/XV2f5Q2T8d
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) March 28, 2023
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1/n Interesting bit of revisionist history from NY Times Opinion. Here’s my take: https://t.co/AlugRILXFv
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) March 28, 2023
2/n The OG assertion coming from the US Govt had nothing to do with lab leak or anything like that. The claim from the White House West Wing in 2020 was that the Chinese Communist Party was sending infected Chinese citizens abroad to ignite a pandemic for global domination
3/n I was in the (virtual) green room with Chuck Todd about to go on MSNBC when the announcement came. Not only was it ridiculous, but it also ignited a disgusting wave of anti-Asian racism in America
4/n Later they came up with the now discredited hypothesis that the SARS-2 coronavirus was created in a laboratory, because of a furin-cleavage site found in the virus, and that was also discredited https://t.co/wK5E5ZextA
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) March 28, 2023
5/n Finally and as a fall-back position a lab leak was alleged, which the biomedical scientific community always said was a possibility including me back in 2021
6/n But no evidence for a lab leak was ever forthcoming, nada, zip, zero. There remains no evidence for a lab leak. And that’s why there’s no published scientific article about this. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but one could say this about any emerging virus.
7/n In contrast, we have several published scientific articles that strongly support the emergence of the virus from a wet market in Wuhan for SARS-2, just like for SARS and published in @ScienceMagazine https://t.co/v4uepokx0i and elsewhere
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) March 28, 2023
8/n Bottom line: stop blaming the biomedical scientists for the conspiracies generated by those with political/other agendas, or for the Chinese Govt that destroyed or hid wet market evidence. Of course in early days there were uncertainties: that’s a reality of most pandemics.
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Reader Interactions
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NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
95 new cases on 03/22/23.
81 new cases on 03/23/23.
57 new cases on 03/24/23.
64 new cases on 03/25/23.
63 new cases on 03/26/23.
49 new cases on 03/27/23.
40 new cases on 03/28/23.
Deaths now at 2220, up 6 since last week.
Hospital beds: we’re at 3% available now, including 8 ICU beds among 4 hospitals. The largest hospital still has no regular available beds, and no available ICU beds now.
R-Jud
Just want to say two things:
rikyrah
Thank you for these posts, AL
Your information is always read, even if I don’t post a reply. I share something of what you post all the time.
Amir Khalid
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health reported 355 new Covid-19 cases on 25th March, for a cumulative reported total of 5,049,268 cases. 354 of these new cases were local infections; one new cases was imported. It also reported one death, for an adjusted cumulative total of 36,979 deaths – 0.73% of the cumulative reported total, 0.73% of resolved cases.
9,111 Covid-19 tests were conducted on 25th March, with a positivity rate of 2.8%.
There were 10,047 active cases on 18th March, 97 more than the day before. 371 were in hospital. 11 confirmed cases were in ICU; of these patients, seven confirmed cases were on ventilators. Meanwhile, 257 patients recovered, for a cumulative total of 5,002,242 patients recovered – 99.1% of the cumulative reported total.
The National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) administered 483 doses of vaccine on 28th March: 30 first doses, 24 second doses, 317 first booster doses, and 133 second booster doses. The cumulative total is 2,8716,371 doses administered: 28,132,697 first doses, 27,545,434 second doses, 16,321,777 first booster doses, and 816,463 second booster doses. 86.1% of the population have received their first dose, 84.3% their second dose, 50.0% their first booster dose, and 2.5% their second booster dose.
Betty
Here in Dominica we are seeing a new outbreak of Covid with cases being reported at the hospital and state prison. I am not aware of any vaccine being available now. My husband and I are both boosted but not able yet at least to get the bivalent booster. Most people here decided Covid was over months ago. Time to get serious again.
New Deal democrat
Our spring respite is likely over, bottoming at levels higher than either 2021 or 2022. According to Biobot, particles bottomed at 365 copies/mL last week, and have increased to 402. This contrasts with 118 last spring, and under 50 in 2021. The increase has taken place in all 4 Census regions, especially in the Midwest, which bottomed first, and is now up to 600 copies/mL.
The culprit is likely XBB1.9.1, which while only 2.5% of infections nationwide as of the CDC’s update last Friday, was already 12.5% of infections in the Midwest. There is another subvariant, XBB.1.16.1, which may be even more infectious, but is not officially reported yet in the US.
There were just over 31,000 “confirmed” cases averaged weekly through March 29, a continued decline. This is still higher than the low number last spring.
Hospitalizations were 17,800 as of March 26, slightly above their recent low of 17,500 on the 23rd; but still above the spring 2022 and mid year 2021 pandemic lows.
At 249 on March 18, the weekly average of deaths made a new low for the past year, and indeed was the lowest of the pandemic except for June and July 2021. In the past year, the third full year of the pandemic, there were a total of 141,000 deaths, vs. about 500,000 during each of the first 2 full years.
Matt McIrvin
I still feel weird about the fact that when I and many people I knew actually got COVID it was after “the end of the pandemic”. At least we were heavily vaccinated.
The mini-wave over the past couple of weeks that seemed to hit a bunch of my coworkers eventually did show up in the regional wastewater counts, though it’s not as large as I’d guessed. I suppose, as I said earlier, there are peculiar selection effects operating.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: That’s odd, because the spike in wastewater should show up before the infections, sometimes as much as a week before. There may be a bigger spike to come.
There were no sessions at my conference about Covid and wastewater, but that’s not surprising because the sessions are mostly about projects cities do with consultants. (Saw a cool presentation about the Marwen storage tunnel in St. Louis! There’s information about it on MSD’s web site, they’re making a short film about building it.) I think that’s the future of Covid detection; because of home testing the reported government numbers are almost meaningless. It’s good that we have home testing, but that’s one of the results of it. Government numbers were never that good anyway because so many people have asymptomatic cases.
RevRick
The conservative mind assumes that all people are awful. This leads them to conclude that if people like me do an awful thing, then even those who say they aren’t are really hiding how they’re doing that awful thing. For them, people acting nobly is pretty much unpossible, except for heroes who sacrifice their lives in battle or situations of grave danger.
If Republican voters are found to have committed voter fraud, then Democrats must be doing it as well, but they’re better at hiding it.
If antivaxxers are grifting, then advocates for vaccinations are doing it for base ($) or nefarious reasons (control). They cannot conceive of the possibility that others genuinely just want to care for the welfare of others.
Ohio Mom
Looking at the bar graph of Covid cases over time in the link in that first Laurie Garrrett tweet — “William Hanage on COVID lessons we haven’t learned” — was a walk down memory lane for me.
I can place the memorial service for my aunt, just before the first bar (had it been scheduled just a week later, it might not have happened at all, two weeks later, we would all have been sequestered in our homes across the country); my cousin’s death from Covid (hospital-acquired infection while being treated for a sarcoidosis flare), just before the big drop when vaccines became available; finally getting to meet my year-old nephew during the big dip that summer of2021, when we thought the end was in sight (ha!); Ohio Family finally catching it during the next to last leveling off. It looks like we did a pretty good job of delaying our infections (who am I kidding, it was dumb luck).
There are also big chunks of time that in retrospect are a complete blank for me. Time stood still for months at a time while we waited and waited the pandemic out. Or we thought we were waiting it out.
Ohio Mom
Did I mention in the last Covid thread that my frail 91 y.o. MIL just got over Covid? It was not any worse than an average head cold for her. Vaccines work!
Jesse
Man, this stuff really breaks people’s brains. Twitter remains, as ever, a terrible place to talk about pretty much everything. I don’t understand the table-pounding insistence that a lab leak is incorrect. Looking at that last tweet thread (twead?), the attitude of the guy towards the lab leak theory is like that of someone who points in some random direction in the night sky and says that somewhere in this exact line, starting at my fingertip and going to the edge of the universe, some humanlike intelligence is, right now, playing the banjo. “Sure, that’s possible, but come on!” I myself lean towards the it-came-from-animals theory, but I don’t totally discount the lab leak theory.
Jesse
Also too the buffonery and rank racism of the Trump admin’s behavior, pointing the finger at China in various ignorant and needlessly inflammatory ways, shouldn’t lead us to dismiss the idea that the Chinese state is in fact guilty of some serious errors. Their behavior at various stages of the pandemic has not been great. You can think that AND think that Trump and his goons are the rankest bigots who fanned the flames unnecessarily.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
Which is really weird, considering how many of them claim to be Christians, who are supposed to be loving their neighbors as themselves.
Of course, ‘neighbor’ seems to have been reinterpreted by conservative Christians to mean ‘fellow believer.’ Which they then proceed to interpret narrowly.
lowtechcyclist
@Jesse:
But AFIACT he’s right, there’s no evidence in support of the lab leak theory. It can’t be disproven because it’s rarely possible to prove a negative.
It’s like whether birth control pills or morning-after pills work by killing the fertilized egg by preventing its implantation in the uterine lining. That’s not the mechanism by which they were designed to work, but there’s no way to prove they never do that. So as far as the ‘pro-lifers’ are concerned, they’re abortifacients, even though there’s no evidence in support of that.
PaulB
I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. It’s based on two facts:
Or, perhaps, there’s also a third fact: that most of the lab leak theories are just bizarre, not based on anything resembling reality.
Given all of this, why wouldn’t there be eye-rolling and pushback when someone chimes in with the usual bullshit?
Another Scott
@Jesse:
(repost) – I hope I don’t have to spell out the implications of this one for Iraq. Krugman has gone on and on about this, seemingly with some small effect these days. The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.
Never give known liars the benefit of the doubt.
There is no evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan virology lab, and overwhelming evidence that it came from infected live animals at the market.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
cckids
Super late to the thread, as always, but some anecdata – in my cashier job, sales of home covid tests are off the charts for the past two weeks. So that’s new.
Bill Arnold
@Jesse:
The very phrase “lab leak” is from a propagandist (maybe amateur), chosen because of the alliteration. The term of art prior to 2020 was “lab escape”. One can go to scholar.google.com to confirm this.
Here’s what’s probably the most important prior, that keeps getting ignored relative to its importance. IMO.
The very-related SARS-1 (AKA SARS) in humans probably had itsorigin in infected palm civets in a Chinese wet market. There are no allegations of a lab escape. The wet markets were not really cleaned up; photos in Wuhan from pre-pandemic in 2019 clearly show animals which can spread SARS-CoV-2. Some of those animals were farmed wildlife, and such tight-packed farming is close to optimal for spread of respiratory viruses within an animal population.
SomeRandomGuy
@Jesse: One of the troubles with the USA today is, people accept a possibility, with no evidence, as equivalent to a possibility that is far more likely.
There’s no evidence that Covid-19 arose as a lab leak (or intentional release), and, there’s reason to doubt it.
There’s real evidence of zoonotic origin (animal-to-human crossover),
So it’s not right, and not-even-wrong, to promote the lab leak as a real hypothesis, rather than a possibility. No evidence = not even a hypothesis.
Global warming might not have anything to do with carbon. God could be warming the earth by using a divine magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s rays on earth, rather than Greenhouse Effect from CO2, methane, et al.. But we have no evidence of “divine magnifying glass” so we ignore it entirely.
Similarly, lab leak is more likely than “divine magnifying glass,” granted, but “no evidence” is still “no evidence.”
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: You’re right, but weird doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’d say twisted and dysfunctional.
And yes, many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have very selective views of who gets included ( and most definitely not anyone who is not them).