Lots going on in the charts today, in this period of calm before the brakes get lifted on the 19th.
The good news first: meagre growth to 32551 cases on a Thurday boosts the doubling time to 26,1 days.
The bad news: the death trend continues to rise further above the...
... hospitalization trend, nearly keeping track with the case trend.
We finally got age breakdown data for June, and there is some good news: the growing incidence rate of childhood hospitalizations relative to cases has reversed and is back to winter levels. While it's not...
... clear why this has happened, it's certainly welcome.
Vaccination in June switched to primarily focusing on the 18-54yo cohort, and this can be clearly seen in their declining share of cases in graph 2. The 55+ cohort continued to decline as immunity built, but appears to...
... have largely leveled off; additional immunity in this cohort will probably only accumulate slowly.
120 doctors and researchers including a number of prominent names recently published a letter in the Lancet decrying the UK's "infect everyone" policy:
An interesting paper came out a few days ago on the topic of autoimmunity playing a role in Long COVID patients. Patients were followed from 5 months to 12 months, during which timeperiod only 22,9% of patients saw full remission of...
The patients were tested for antinuclear antibodies at the >160 titre. In the general population, about 5% exceed these thresholds, but in the study patients, 43,6% did, with the symptoms worse in those with high ANA levels.
It is not...
...news that COVID causes antiself antibodies, and in particular antinuclear antibodies - this has been well studied in relation to the acute phase of the disease. And indeed, concern had previously been raised that these may persist past the end of the acute phase. This...
... study shows that autoimmunity is a common problem in Long COVID patients post-infection.
In other news, I continue to be staggered at the rate of growth of Spain's "wall of COVID", with cases jumping from "nearly nothing" to "half the record peak" in just two weeks.
Greece and the Netherlands likewise now look like they've driven straight into a wall.
Italy and Germany, the last two big holdouts, are both at 13% week-over-week case growth. France, the previous holdout, is up to 49%.
As Portugal starts requiring negative PCR tests or proof of vaccination for hotels and indoor dining, Italy is struggling to find a solution to allow fans to attend the Euro 2020 final in the UK. The solution? Only 1000 tickets, all fans must remain in a chaperoned bubble,
... all arrive and leave at the same time, and everyone has to quarantine for five days after returning.
Greece has authorized mandatory vaccinations for workers in specific fields after approval from a bio-ethics committee. This includes healthcare workers and staff at...
... nursing homes.
Lastly, Mexico, seeking to restore a normal open border with the US, has been focusing its backlogged vaccination system on border towns, hoping to complete them within the month.
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32367 cases on a Saturday brings the centre-averaged doubling time down to slightly to 18 days. UK hospitalizations continue the expected exponential trend.
It's been previously discussed that Delta's effectiveness is by and large not through any clever immune-evasion tricks,...
... but rather largely through simply being a more "fit" virus due a higher binding affinity for ACE2. New research continues to show how fit it is:
Over the course of the pandemic, the mean time between exposure and PCR-detectable levels of ...
... virus has fallen from 6 to 4 days. More concerningly however, the detectable levels of the virus were 1260 times (not percent... times) higher at the first detection than early in the pandemic. Delta, quite simply, surges to high viral loads extremely quickly.
35707 UK cases today drops the doubling time down a notch to 22,7 days. Despite 4 of 10 of England's ambulances already being overloaded and on "Black Alert" (something we only know thanks to leaks):
... government not insisted on lifting the brakes on 19 July, whether the continued progress of vaccination would be able to dull this wave before it gets too bad. A 3-week doubling time is a significant improvement, after all.
But I guess we'll never know.
With all but a handful of European countries back into case growth, Germany - one of the more slow-growing European countries - has declared all of Spain a COVID risk area and requires that travelers provide a negative test result to avoid quarantine.
27989 cases today ticks the doubling time slightly back up to 10,2 days; however, this only delays hitting the previous peak by a few hours. England hospitalization growth accelerates, as would be expected.
Across Europe, more countries keep swinging back into growth.
Vaccination is trending up in many of them, but not all; the UK in particular is seeing a significant and sustained dropoff in vaccination rates. Israel is finally starting to see some meaningful (although still low) vaccination rates again.
While yesterday's numbers were boosted by underreporting the previous day, today's 20479 are not. Doubling time drops even further, to 7,2 days. UK hospitalization and death counts for recent days have also been revised (upwards).
While I have not been putting a particular...
emphasis on Scotland, they've already surpassed their all-time peak daily case rate.
Week-over-week case growth in European countries of meaningful size is now UK +68%, Finland +49%, Belgium +29%, Portugal +25%, Spain +22%, and Irelaland +0,4%. Norway...
... dips slightly off the list at -0,1%.
How well is past infection with earlier COVID strains protecting against Delta? The data is still preliminary and needs followup, but thusfar the answer appears to be "poorly".
A number of infectious disease experts who previously got..
The odds of any control having had COVID would be small to begin with, but the odds are made even smaller by the fact that they bare minimum never had any symptoms worth getting checked out.
It's a legitimate criticism (separating cause and effect), but she's taking this Biobank study in isolation, but it's not at all in isolation; it's just the latest of a long series of studies. Take this one, for example:
TL/DR: "Our study provides evidence for substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection." Compared to controls and to other respiratory illnesses.
It can also be pointed out that some *causes* of chronic...
First off, "the flu" is caused by influenzavirus. "Colds" can be caused by a wide range of viruses, a minority of them including coronaviruses, but none involving this branch (sarbecoviruses), which have a very different mode of action.
The...
@SwingTraderCO@garnettca@Mista3rdEye@GovofCO reason why it's proven so hard to develop herd immunity to the flu and colds is specifically because they're so incredibly diverse. They've been evolving alongside humans since time immemorial, though new ones periodically transfer in from wild animals and certain random...