#Flu and #SARSCoV2 in New South Wales (NSW), Australia to week ending 25JUN2022.
😷 #SARSCoV2 total positive numbers now rising again, as #flu positives decline.
😷#SARSCoV2 rate is ~100/100,000 population for all age groups and steady while for #flu, it varies by age, up to ~60/100,00 for those aged 0-9 years, and declining
😷In terms of emergency department presentations, #flu-like illness is declining while #COVID19 presentations have stopped declining - slight⬆
😷Test positive from #SARSCoV2 was 16% up from 13% last week.
😷For #flu it was 9% down from 15%.
🧬Flu A/H3N2 remains the main influenza virus
🧬Omicron BA.5 has now surpassed BA.2 as the main variant; BA.4 in 3rd place
🦠As for the other respiratory viruses, still a huge amount of activity in these trends.
AdVs rising. HMPV and PIVs high and steady. RSV (respiratory syncytial virus; maybe too early to say this), EVs & RVs declining.
🛌Bronchiolitis, a clinical diagnosis of infants usually associated with RSV, continued to increase with 695 (up from 627) presentations this week in children aged 0-4 years. Of these presentations, 41% (~285) were admitted to hospital.
Thanks, as always, to @NSWhealth for always reliably producing Australia's best set of data on respiratory viruses and keeping your community informed about their illnesses.
Graphs and data from: health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/cov…
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#Flu in #Queensland, week to 26JUN2022
😷Total numbers are declining (again) but..
😷current data point(s) often changes in the subsequent week as outstanding results are finalised and reported
😷Percent positive with a moving average.
🤧Still >10% but declining.
😷Hospital admission numbers because of #flu, broken up by region of Qld, with historical context.
🤒Drop in admissions this week
😷Yes, there is undoubtedly more testing capacity in Aus after labs beefed up PCR testing for the pandemic.
😷One way to check this is a real rise in #flu cases, not just over-testing is to positivity rate, deaths, hospital beds & ICU occupied beds with flu-confirmed patients.
🛏️year to date (YTD from April 2022), 54 lab-confirmed influenza deaths (+27 since last fortnight)🛏️YTD, 989 sentinel hospital admissions (+256; slowing)
🥽YTD, 60 (6.1%) of those admitted to ICU (+15; slowing)
Does Australia have a public health infection-related data-hoarding, education and communication problem?
•Why is Australia so stingy with its data?
•Why are we so bad at community communication about preventing infections?
•What is it about us?
And I say this with the caveat that @NSWHealth is the gold standard in this area and does so much good work in these spaces.
So we know it *can* be funded, the expertise exists and it just is possible.
Maybe a CDC will fix this communication failure and help standardise content and its provision. But nothing is stopping it from having been fixed long ago. And NSW shows that.
•Why don't we have detailed, easily accessible, stored retrospective data on all infections over time?
"Face masks and coverings cannot be seen in isolation but are part of ‘policy packages’"
"Consistent and effective public messaging is vital to public adherence of wearing face masks and coverings. Conflicting policy advice generates confusion" ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-0…
And in news just in...#Flu says "haha, just kidding, still going", to Queensland. #Flu in #Queensland to 19JUN2022
😷current data point(s) often changes in the subsequent week as outstanding results are finalised and reported
😷The biggest per population infection impact is in the under 20-year-olds.
😷Percent positive with a moving average. This also shows the rebound in the 20+ group.
In this video interview with Kary Mullis he (actually) says "with PCR you can find almost anything in anybody". Correct - 𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 but only 𝙞𝙛 the thing is there. PCR cannot find something not there. It also can't find it if present in v. low amounts
He also says..."I don't think you can misuse PCR". "It's [PCR] a really quantitative thing. It tells you something about nature and about what's there".
"That's not a misuse it's sort of a misinterpretation".
Full version of that video is here: archive.org/details/corpor… & archive.org/details/corpor…
It's enlightening for several reasons.
In taking apart his own Intro by Esai Morales (for being wrong), Mullis makes rambling note, "this is the way the news is" (while chewing on tree leaves).