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Phil Kerpen Profile picture
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15 Oct, 7 tweets, 3 min read
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…
This great short article from @m_soond explains the viral interference theory of flu vanishing when COV2 became epidemic.
medium.com/illumination-c…
If true, we would expect flu to return when COV2 has infected a large share of the population and recedes to endemicity.

That may be happening in the Indian subcontinent.

Here are WHO charts for India for Flu and COV2 with the first week of July, 2021 marked.
PLC has more on India and the rest of the subcontinent.
US outlook: Flu is still missing in all regions and it is possible the whole country will skip another flu year, as the southern hemisphere did; if flu does return to normal levels somewhere, it will likely be a signal that COV2 yielded and receded to endemic levels there.
Correction: New Zealand RSV wave peaked in July, their winter, so not out-of-season but larger than usual.
esr.cri.nz/our-services/c…

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More from @kerpen

Phil Kerpen Profile picture
15 Oct
We have the first CDC Flu view report of the 2021-22 respiratory season.

Let's do a complete Friday ILI-Day thread for MMWR week 40.

cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ind…
Flu testing. Traditionally the clinical lab figures are the surveillance numbers, but a lot of testing has shifted to public health labs.

Comps are this year's week 40 to previous year's week 40 week-of reports, not final, to account for lag.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
Here's CDC's ILI chart for this week. 2020-21 is now complete, and the baseline was never reached.
Read 17 tweets
Phil Kerpen Profile picture
20 Sep
Pediatric COVID and Flu Deaths
The burden estimates are the best measure of flu for many reasons explained by CDC:
cdc.gov/flu/about/burd…

Given hypertesting and the any-cause-of-death-after-positive-test definition, we have the opposite problem of overascertainment for COVID.
They do have the statistically modeled COVID pediatric deaths, 332 through May:
cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…

But the footnote explains they didn't run the usual flu statistical model, but rather used the death cert count as a floor and ran the model on other deaths.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Kerpen Profile picture
16 Sep
Biden, September 9, 2021:

"Tonight, I’m announcing we will increase the average pace of shipment across the country of free monoclonal antibody treatments by another 50 percent."

INCREASE.

Less than a week later he CUT allocations to southern states by 50%.
The Biden COVID plan posted on the White House website on September 9 is even more clear. Said the 50% increase would be *in September*. It's still there!

whitehouse.gov/covidplan/#care
Temporal equity is one heck of a euphemism for denying lifesaving treatment needed *now* in the south to stockpile it for *potential* winter use in the north.

Especially when Congress has already appropriated $$$ to buy as much more as needed.

phe.gov/emergency/even…
Read 4 tweets
Phil Kerpen Profile picture
8 Sep
As suspected, the CDC's current school mask guidance came at the request/demand of the teachers unions, not based on any science.

Thanks @apublictrust for obtaining the emails.

foxnews.com/politics/cdc-t…
This explains the mystery of the CDC "science brief" that contained no science supporting the mask guidance and excluded the CDC's own most relevant study, which found no significant effect of student mask mandates.
CDC aided and abetted teachers unions (ineffectively!) trying to minimize their members' already microscopic post-vax COVID risk over the social/emotional health and language/communication development of children.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Kerpen Profile picture
7 Sep
This baffling string of Randi-esque non sequiturs is quite remarkable.

I do appreciate the confession that child-masking is driven by **anger**.

Anger, apparently, that someone, somewhere, might be living a normal life.

Let's take a look.
Ample! is one link, refs endpoint-driven ecological studies from last summer (fall/winter data showed no mask effect so none ever updated) and mechanistic stuff with mannequins assuming a larger article size than respiratory aerosols. And hairdressers!
Keep cloth-masking kids, because the Bangladesh study found no reduction in symptoms in villages with adults given cloth masks, and a small reduction (only in age 50+) in villages with adults given surgical masks. This is an argument *for* child-masking?
Read 14 tweets
Phil Kerpen Profile picture
6 Sep
"Primary school pupils were not required to wear masks"
The school closures, the masks, the cancellation of sports and activities... the years and months of denying kids normal life was for *absolutely nothing*.
The same people who were 100% wrong about school closures are sure as ever about forced child-masking. No surprise there. But why is anybody still listening to them???
Read 4 tweets

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