Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of February 28

The Biden Administration Killed America’s Collective Pandemic Approach: Protections meant to shield everyone can’t be a matter of personal preference.

In the new playbook, recommendations for individual people, not communities, sit front and center, and mitigation frequently falls under the purview of medicine rather than public health—heaping more responsibility on the already dysfunctional American health-care system. “It is public health’s job to protect everybody, not just those people who are vaccinated, not just those people who are healthy,” says Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the director of the Department of Public Health in Oak Park, Illinois. I asked Chapple-McGruder if the CDC’s new guidelines meet that mark. “Not at all,” she said. (The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.)

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A medical framework—almost resembling a prescription model—is not public-health guidance, which centers community-level benefits achieved through community-level action. People act in the collective interest, a tactic that benefits everyone, not just themselves. Where the CDC leaves us now feels especially disorienting when we consider where most mask-up messaging began: with the idea that masking was an act of communal good—“my mask protects you, your mask protects me.” Now masking is about, as the CDC puts it, “personal preference, informed by personal level of risk.”

An anti-vax judge is preventing the US Navy from deploying a warship

commanding officer of a $1.8 billion guided-missile destroyer refuses to get vaccinated, and refuses to even get tested when he has obvious covid symptoms:

Brandon testified that last November, he spoke with Doe on Doe’s ship one day before its scheduled departure. Doe was experiencing multiple symptoms of COVID, and appeared to have a relatively severe case; he could, Brandon recalled, “barely speak.” Yet Doe refused to get tested—a clear violation of protocol—and attended a briefing in a cramped room with about 60 other people. Brandon ordered Doe to get a test, which revealed that he did, indeed, have COVID, and exposed dozens of others to the virus.

and a federal judge (George HW Bush appointee) is prioritizing that commander's "religious liberty" over the Navy's desire to relieve him of command for insubordination and send the ship out commanded by someone who can follow orders.

there are 300 people on the ship (based on the description in the article, it's an Arleigh Burke class). the vast majority of them (97% of the Navy overall) are vaccinated. their commander is not. seems like that's probably bad for morale.

Looking at US covid statistics on the Washington Post page: the US overall is down 37% to 20 cases per 100k. The last time it was this low was July. New York dropped to 10 per 100k, also last seen there in July. Seems good!

In California the decline seems to have stalled at 34 per 100k (up 3%.) Is it a blip? What's going on here?

Looking at the California state dashboard clears this up somewhat. The difference seems to be "by report date" versus "by episode date". Going by report date, the numbers for California are steady (slight increase), but by episode date they are down.

However, data over the last seven days is incomplete, and the "by episode date" is going to slope downward regardless. The CA dashboard gives 19.5 cases per 100k as its top-line number, which seems to be the "by episode date" number from a week ago. The "by report date" average is at 30.3 cases per 100k, which is close to the Washington Post number.

It's rather confusing. We need better dashboards.

The county numbers in the Washington Post are even more confusing - it says there is a 109% increase in San Mateo County and 158% increase in Alameda, which would be alarming if true. This agrees with the "by report date" graph in the state dashboard, but there's no sign of any increase in the "by episode date" graph.

I can think of two possibilities: (1) reporting delays are the same as last week. Cases are steady in California due to being up a lot in Alameda and San Mateo, or (2) there has been more backfilling of older cases than usual in these counties over the last week, so the "reported by" graph is misleading.

There don't seem to be any news reports of an alarming increase in cases the local news for Alameda or San Mateo. But I'm no longer sure I know what happened in the past week in California.

Hong Kong to Lock Down City for Mass Testing, Sing Tao Says

Hong Kong is planning to enforce a lockdown of the city to ensure a mandatory Covid-19 testing drive planned for this month is effective, Sing Tao Daily reported.

Testing of the financial hub’s 7.4 million people will start after March 17, the newspaper reported, citing people it didn’t identify.

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After two years of limited outbreaks, Hong Kong is facing its toughest virus challenge yet, with the highly transmissible omicron variant testing its zero-tolerance, high intensity approach to keeping Covid out. New cases have ballooned from a few hundred a day to more than 34,000 on Monday. Deaths are also ticking higher, with the under-vaccinated elderly population bearing the brunt as the virus spreads. Officials have already had to relinquish some of their key containment measures, including mandatory isolation for cases and detailed contact tracing, as the outbreak spirals out of control.

140 million Americans have had coronavirus, according to blood tests analyzed by CDC

The estimates, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that about 43 percent of the country has been infected by the virus. The study shows that the majority of children have also been infected.

The data goes through late January, when the omicron variant of the coronavirus was causing more than 500,000 cases a day, meaning the number of Americans now infected is considerably higher. The data comes from 72,000 blood samples taken in January.

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Just before the omicron variant, a seroprevalence study that included both vaccination and natural infection found antibodies in more than 90 percent of adults, but that did not prevent omicron’s enormous infection rates, hospitalization and death, said Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokeswoman.

Vaccination or exposure to the coronavirus may have reduced the deadliness and severity of the omicron wave, Nordlund said.

The Pandemic is following a very predictable and depressing pattern: As with diseases such as malaria and HIV, rich countries are “moving on” from COVID while poor ones continue to get ravaged.

But in the global South, COVID-19 is much harder to ignore. More than a year after the start of the mass-vaccination campaign, nearly 3 billion people are still waiting for their first shot. While an average of 80 percent of people in high-income countries have gotten at least one dose, that figure stands at just 13 percent in low-income countries.

You may know malaria as an infectious disease that affects poor “tropical” countries. But for several thousands of years, malaria was a global menace. During the 20th century alone, the disease is estimated to have accounted for up to 5 percent of all human deaths. It was eradicated from the global North by the 1970s, but the rest of the world was left behind.

The same phenomenon has unfolded with tuberculosis, a disease so old that DNA of TB bacteria have been identified in Egyptian mummies. “Consumption,” as TB was once called, was highly prevalent in Europe and North America. From the 1600s to the 1800s, TB caused 25 percent of all deaths in Europe. By the 1980s, TB case numbers had decreased significantly in the West, largely thanks to drug treatments and reductions in poverty. But again, TB remains a problem in developing countries (and among marginalized populations within the global North). In 2020, TB killed 1.5 million people, more than 80 percent of whom lived in low- and middle-income countries.

“By epidemic we actually mean a pandemic that no longer kills people in rich countries,” wrote Peter Sands, the CEO of the Global Fund, an international group that combats these diseases. “By endemic we actually mean a disease the world could get rid of but hasn’t. HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria are pandemics that have been beaten in rich countries. Allowing them to persist elsewhere is a policy choice and a budgetary decision.”