HCoV NL-63 appears post-peak but has turned back up. HCoV-OC43 still rising sharply. HCoV-229E rising at lower levels. Last year's dominant HCoV-HKU1 still near zero.
Here are the HCoVs with SARS-CoV2, from Biofire's newest respiratory panel.
SARS-CoV2 peaked and declined as the HCoVs re-appeared and rose.
Sweden week 18. No masks, no lockdowns, no school closures under age 16 -- and a full year with no Flu A, Flu B, or RSV; RSV ticks up again after reappearing finally four weeks ago. HCoVs flat, remain higher than seasonal norm after long absence.
Germany week 18. Rhinoviruses tick back up. Slight decrease for HCoVs and decrease for SARS-CoV2, first time in 5 weeks they haven't moved in opposite directions. influenza.rki.de/Wochenberichte…
Brazil. Very lax control measures, and a president who urges people to disregard them. A completely skipped flu season. apps.who.int/flumart/Defaul…
It wasn't masks, which were never used in many countries where flu disappeared and have also been shown to be ineffective for stopping influenza in many, many studies.
Japan masks every year, and pushed masks hard in 2019 with no apparent effect. But in 2020-21 flu disappeared with low stringency COVID intervention. apps.who.int/flumart/Defaul…
The idea mitigations worked but unmitigated SARS-CoV2 just has a higher R (popular now among the same crowd that still said "twindemic!" when flu had been gone for months, like Anthony "mask seasonally" Fauci) is way too facile.
Outside of testing ramp up, I don't think we've seen R > 2, even in places without NPIs.
Rhinoviruses bounced right back despite lower R and RSV was gone until recently with comparable R to SARS-CoV2.
HCoVs were gone until SARS-CoV2 declined, then returned even with lockdown.
Plus, as Biden adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm admitted, our mitigation just hasn't been very effective.
Maybe in places like Australia and New Zealand where mitigations stopped SARS-CoV2 they also stopped other viruses.
But in countries where SARS-CoV2 went wild? No.
Osterholm: "There is this viral interference"
Viral interference is a well-known (but poorly understood) phenomenon. Interference from rhinovirus is generally thought to have ended the swine flu epidemic in 2009. thelancet.com/journals/lanmi…
Overall the season has been so mild that drug store chains took big losses.
Rite Aid CEO Heyward Donigan: "During the fourth quarter our industry was impacted by a historically soft cough, cold and flu season." forbes.com/sites/brucejap…
Pediatric internships and residencies have to be extended or supplemented because they just didn't have enough patients to gain the normal amount of clinical experience. aappublications.org/news/2021/03/1…
CDC still reports just one pediatric flu death this season.
The numbers in chart in previous tweet are lab-confirmed only, but flu testing is very limited (see totals at top of thread) so CDC also publishes best estimates of total pediatric flu deaths. cdc.gov/flu/about/burd…
COVID testing is much, much more abundant than flu testing and the definition of deaths typically used (any cause of death within 30-60 days of a positive test result) tends to overcount.
Per CDC, 2.5% of all death certificates in the COVID count have a cause of death that cannot plausibly be connected to COVID.
But that figure is much higher for younger age groups: 35.2% under age 18 and 10.2% 18 to 29.
Keeping that in mind, this table compares CDC best estimates of pediatric flu deaths with the first two seasons of pediatric COVID deaths as reported.
(Note that everywhere in the world where COVID was epidemic, it circulated *instead of*, not in addition to, influenza.)
We are now near the end of the *safest* respiratory season for children ever recorded. (Including places where schools never closed and nobody masked.)
Yet many places locked children out of school, and some places are still doing so. Many more kids are masked.
It's a disgrace.
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Fauci's fixer David Morens: "I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia'd but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe." zaob78xab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001Hh…
Foia lady is "an old friend, Marg Moore, who leads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs."
Morens deleted all emails related to origin "when the sh-- starting hitting the fan."
Huge Senate votes tomorrow on @RogerMarshallMD bill to terminate the COVID national emergency (how many of the 12 Dems who voted yes for identical bill in November will flip??) and @SenCapito bill to ban Biden's insane WOTUS rule that lets EPA/Army Corps call anything a wetland.
I am told @DjokerNole doesn't want a waiver; he wants the ban lifted for everyone.
Why does Old Joe still have this insane policy in place, when his own CDC said NPIs should not differentiate based on vaccine status back in August??? cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…
If @DjokerNole changes his mind about coming to the US before Biden ends his ban, there is an easy way to get to Miami: take a ferry from the Bahamas, which violates neither the CDC/FAA air travel mandate nor the DHS land/ferry mandates, which are specific to Canada and Mexico.
Even taken at face value (and ignoring that more distancing was observed in the masking intervention villages) the effect size as so small that it loses significance in pooling (see Cochrane) even though it was by far the largest study.
(And I've still never gotten an explanation of how the Bangladesh study apparently lost 15,000 baseline blood samples.)