Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of February 21

Based on the Washington Post statistics page, US cases are down another 40% to 31 per 100,000 (7 day average). The last time they were this low was mid-July.

Cases are falling in all states except Maine, which is still weird. (I assume it's still reporting backlog. Their hospitalizations are average.) New York (an eastern state where the Omicron wave was early) is at 16/100k, which is where they were in August. California doesn't report any numbers on weekends but they're at 33/100k, about average.

US hospitalizations are at 18 per 100,000, down 22% and about where they were in December. Both New York and California are about average, oddly enough.

The death rate lags hospitalizations and cases and hasn't improved much yet. The US is down 10% to 2215 per day, which is still very high.

Seems like the Omicron wave is close to over in the US as far as the risk of infection is concerned, and hospitals are no longer overloaded, but for those who became sick, the consequences aren't over yet. Statistically speaking, that is.

Looks like the CDC is going to change their masking recommendations to be based on hospitalization rates more than cases. Nice for people who are low risk, I guess. Sucks for the rest of us, including folks who think they're low risk but aren't.

[Realistically it won't change much for me because I'm in Florida and no one masks here anyway, but if they drop the requirement for airplanes or doctor offices, I won't be able to travel for medical appointments any time soon.]

This hospital tried to save a man with covid. Then the threats started. (Washington Post)

[In early December], covid hospitalizations in New Hampshire were at a record high. The small community hospital Caple leads was full, its employees exhausted.

As soon as Caple arrived inside, a colleague told her that something strange was happening. Calls were flooding into the switchboard, and senior staff members were receiving a flurry of voice messages and emails to their work accounts.

The callers were impassioned and vehement, demanding that the hospital begin treating a covid patient in its care with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug. As the day went on, the volume of calls grew so large that the hospital shut down its main number.

[...]

On Dec. 17, a note with a bomb threat was found at building near the main hospital that houses practices such as pediatrics, police said. Dale Girard, a Claremont native who has provided the hospital with ambulance services for more than 30 years, said he cannot recall another time when a bomb threat targeted the hospital.

All employees and patients who could be sent home were evacuated. The roads to the hospital were blocked off by members of the county sheriff’s department as bomb-sniffing dogs roamed the premises, starting with the emergency room. As the search unfolded, the locked-down hospital was eerily quiet. No device was found.

Mark Chase, the chief of police in Claremont, said the authorities currently have no information connecting the bomb threat to the pressure campaign. A criminal investigation based on physical evidence collected on the scene is ongoing, Chase said.

Your Local Epidemiologist has a helpful summary of the controversy about what happened in Denmark and the scientific evidence regarding the BA.2 variant.

BA.2 is something to keep an eye on, but I’m not too concerned. I’m more concerned about another variant popping out of nowhere like Omicron did.