Covid 19

But, South African hospitalizations and deaths are a good sign that this is not as bad. They are having a huge spike in cases, but not hospitalizations or deaths.

 

More vaccines in the US might hurt rather than help with new mutations happening.


https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/22/who-says-covid-vaccine-booster-programs-will-prolong-pandemic.html

World Health Organization officials on Wednesday criticized blanket Covid-19 vaccine booster programs as poor countries struggle to obtain initial doses, warning that the unequal access to immunizations could lead to more mutated variants that drag out the crisis.

"Blanket booster programs are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing.

 

https://www.reuters.com/world/afric...ca-vaccines-with-short-shelf-life-2021-12-22/

ABUJA, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Nigeria on Wednesday destroyed more than a million doses of expired AstraZeneca (AZN.L) vaccines in a bid to assure a wary public that they have been taken out of circulation.

The destruction came more than a week after health authorities said some COVID-19 doses donated by rich Western nations had a shelf life that left only weeks to administer the shots. Reuters reported on Dec. 7 that around one million COVID-19 vaccines were estimated to have expired in Nigeria in November without being used.

 

Yap, those unvaccinated people everywhere are the big problem now, including those in the US.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/n...red-inaccurate-death-certificates/8899157002/

Uncounted: Inaccurate death certificates across the country hide the true toll of COVID-19

December 22, 2021, 3:05 PM

n late January, the official death toll from COVID-19 in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, stood at 210.

At a makeshift memorial at a local Episcopal church, friends and relatives planted small, white flags representing how many people had died. Some inscribed flags with the names of those they had lost.

But a couple hundred flags were missing. Those people almost certainly died from COVID-19, according to an examination of newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but their death certificates don’t mention it. Instead, they list conditions with symptoms that look a lot like COVID-19, such as Alzheimer’s disease, hypertension and diabetes.

Nationwide, nearly 1 million more Americans have died in 2020 and 2021 than in normal, pre-pandemic years, but about 800,000 deaths have been officially attributed to COVID-19, according to the CDC data. A majority of those additional 195,000 deaths are unidentified COVID-19 cases, public health experts have long suggested, pointing to the unusual increase in deaths from natural causes.

An investigation by Documenting COVID-19, the USA TODAY Network and experts reveals why so many deaths have gone uncounted: After overwhelming the nation’s health care system, the coronavirus evaded its antiquated, decentralized system of investigating and recording deaths.

Short-staffed, undertrained and overworked coroners and medical examiners took families at their word when they called to report the death of a relative at home. Coroners and medical examiners didn’t review medical histories or order tests to look for COVID-19. They and even some physicians attributed deaths to inaccurate and nonspecific causes that are meaningless to pathologists. In some cases, stringent rules for attributing a death to COVID-19 created obstacles for relatives of the deceased and contradicted CDC guidance.

 

When science becomes political, it ceases to be science.

<excerpt>

"Michael Levitt, a Nobel Prize-winning structural biology professor at Stanford University, has been disinvited from an upcoming academic conference that he was slated to headline, the scholar announced on Twitter on Sunday.

The reason, according to Levitt, is because he has not toed the party line on COVID settled science, so to speak. Levitt has argued against COVID lockdowns and is a signer of “The Great Barrington Declaration” that warns of “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

More: https://www.thecollegefix.com/stanf...-skeptic-disinvited-from-academic-conference/

 

So if Levitt took the politics out of his position he might not have been disinvited, as HE claims? Odd that those infusing politics into science seem to miss that fact. I mean what structural biologist is not an expert in infectious diseases and how to best prevent their spread?

The College Fix? A right leaning student paper really is a great source for you politicts.

 

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-college-fix/

The College Fix


Last updated on March 26th, 2021 at 10:39 am


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https://www.sfgate.com/shopping/article/Experts-warn-cloth-masks-dont-work-16722629.php

Experts warn that cloth masks don’t work (again), recommend tests



https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/23/1066871176/mask-n95-omicron-contagious

"Cloth masks are not going to cut it with omicron," says Linsey Marr, a researcher at Virginia Tech who studies how viruses transmit in the air.

 

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sfgate/

 

Given the use of cloth masks was a stop gap due to the lack of adequate PPE for the professional healthcare workers and the general population early on in the pandemic, everyone really should be using N95 or similar masks. The problem is the number of folks who not only do not want any masks, but do not even want the vaccine either.

 

Yeah, that whole Freedom thing sure gets in the way when folks don't do as they are told by politicians.

 

The problem is that rights and freedoms are not absolute because they interfere with the rights and freedoms of others, which too many of those folks cannot comprehend. Maybe if we did not whitewash the history lessons so much we would see better educated folks.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/long-history-coercive-health-responses-american-law

First, involuntary measures to control disease have a long history in North America.

Colonies and, later, states have imposed such measures since the beginning of American history, though they have become less frequent as modern hygiene and medicine have reduced the prevalence of infectious disease.

Parliament, which legislated for the American colonies until independence, passed its first statute to regulate the practice of quarantine in 1604, likely in response to a severe outbreak of plague the year before. The law, known as King James’s Act, gave local officials draconian powers to impose and enforce isolation and quarantine of potential plague carriers. Any person infected, residing in an infected house or even being present in one could be “shut-up” in that house until the authorities chose to lift the quarantine, a tactic reportedly used by China to contain COVID-19 in Hubei province.

The earliest recorded quarantines in the colonies were against smallpox, dating back at least to the 1620s. The first formal quarantine law enacted by one of the American colonies followed in 1647, in Massachusetts. By the early 18th century, Massachusetts added a law permitting local authorities to isolate ill people in separate houses.

 

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/north-carolina?view=mask-use&tab=trend



The projections were last updated at 11:30 p.m. Pacific, December 21, 2021. This page contains summaries of the results for 230+ locations, special analyses, explanations of the methods, and other tools to help understand our COVID-19 projections.

https://www.healthdata.org/about/history

 

A couple countries in Europe, check out the last day or two. Each are about 65M people.

 

Some more bad news in Europe. Denmark is half the population of NC, and a third the physical size. So it's not a bad representative population. Europe seems to be a week or two ahead of the US on the curve, and NC is about a week behind the curve for the US on average.





Trending not so great in the US.

 

BNO Newsroom
@BNODesk

BREAKING: U.S. reports 484,377 new coronavirus cases, setting world record

8:38 PM · Dec 29, 2021

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/04/us-...-new-daily-covid-cases-in-global-record-.html

U.S. reports over 1 million new daily Covid cases as omicron surges

A total of 1,082,549 new coronavirus cases were reported Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, as the highly infectious omicron variant continues to spread throughout the country and beyond.

 

Hopefully this will turn into good news. It should lead us out of the pandemic due to increased immunity.