2) the new study also mentions 20% greater risk of hospitalization among kids with #Omicron compared to an older strain last year.
3) Also, the protective effects of prior infection has waned and further erode by #Omicron. ➡️ Bottomline: don’t rely on past infection immunity!
4) that said, analysis suggested a 29% lower severity versus the earlier D614G strain last year. But we don’t know if this is adjusted for critical factors— age adjustment of new cases today? Vaccine adjustment? Prior infection adjustment? Vaccine / infection recency? All key!
5) Other epidemiologists have concerns if this data is too optimistic given that a lot of South Africa 🇿🇦 is “effectively a 3 dose population” given how many past waves it has endured (IHME estimates 70%+ infected) and plus vaccinations = a boosted population.
6) the data is from 211,000 positive PCR tests, of which 41% had 2 shots of Pfizer.
7) CRITICAL REMINDER—small changes in severity isn’t what will hospitalize/kill most people—it’s the exponential cases via higher contagiousness. Even with 1/10ths the lethality and a modest 2x transmission will kill more very quickly. #Omicron is likely 4-6x more transmissible!
9) So I dug further & found they adjusted for age & vaccination for the 20% higher risk of hospitalization in kids, 29% lower risk in adults with #Omicron. ➡️But the data is also weird—it showed lower risk with Delta—which has been proven to be **more severe** many times before!
10) if we match up cases of each wave versus the mortality time lag… by shifting the time scale… we are still way too early to pick up the deaths yet. HT @stevenjfrisch
11) I do not think hospitalizations have even come close to peaking yet. In Gauteng province epicenter, there are a lot of delays in hospital reporting. nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-i…
12) this new SA study’s 33% Pfizer efficacy semi matches the significantly lower neutralization of #Omicron seem in the Innsbruck AT study below. See thread 🧵
JUST IN— W.H.O. Declares Global Emergency Over New Mpox Outbreak. The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15. The outbreak has spread through 13 countries in Africa, including a few that had never reported mpox cases before.
2) public health emergency of international concern— Also known as PHEIC, this is a status given by WHO to “extraordinary events” that pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease.
3) The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared the outbreak a public health emergency of continental security the day before — the first such declaration by the agency since its inception in 2017.
Concerning—CDC now says that 42 states are seeing rising rates of #COVID19 again—with levels high or very high in 35 states (and rising). COVID wastewater levels have already surpassed last summer’s peak and climbing fast. #CovidIsNotOver cdc.gov/forecast-outbr…
2) Substantial 28% increase in one week. Question is how high it will go. It’s a new variant (mostly KP2 and KP3 and JN1), which are evasive against past infection and past vaccines.
A girl using cover name JANE DOE testified under oath at Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial that she was introduced to Trump by Jeffrey Epstein when she was 14 years old. Pass it on.
Trump’s name appears 7 times in Epstein’s latest files. They regularly called each other according to phone logs. Trump says Epstein is a “terrific guy”. And he traveled on flights, according to logs, to Epstein’s island multiple times.
3) THIS STUFF IS NEW—not old Epstein-Trump info. New information regarding Epstein's child trafficking activities was released 7/2/24. Documents from 2016 are now out of date and do not show the depth of Trump's dealings with Epstein... READ MORE:
Reminder—Trump had expressed executing people on many occasions while President, according to his own Attorney General. Now the Supreme Court has green lit any official act with full presidential immunity. Germany did the same in 1933. It turned out great.
2) If we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it. How Germany became Nazi Germany in 1933….
📍 The New York Times Is Failing Its Readers Badly on Covid
📌“Example of ‘science opinion’ run amok in the [NY Times] is a piece… by Zeynep Tufekci, a commentator with no training in biological science or epidemiology… ➡️Tufekci plays into the hands of the anti-science politicians who now seek vengeance on the flimsiest of grounds.”
2) “Tufekci also adds to the ongoing pile-on about whether the directive to maintain a distance of six feet from others was needed. Although the precise distance was indeed somewhat arbitrary, there was no possibility of obtaining hard data in the relevant time frame. The six-foot distance was a reasonable assumption based on public health history, and the practice of social distancing for other respiratory pathogens, particularly those spread by droplets. It was also adopted in multiple other countries, for the same reasons.”
3) “The problem here isn’t that Tufekci is questioning the evidentiary basis of the six-foot rule—science and public health cannot progress if we don’t evaluate the results of our work. But that progress is more effective when grounded in good-faith inquiry, rather than the kinds of attacks Tufekci levels against government scientists for doing their best in desperate circumstances. This only serves to bolster the forces who seek to destroy the US public health infrastructure, not make it better.
Tufekci also leaves the impression that she alone realized SARS-CoV-2 was airborne early on. In fact, the debate about transmission was fast and furious within the scientific community at that time”