Written a decade ago, the article was about how clinicians too often falsely reassured patients w/terminal #cancer that treatment was working just fine.
There are many parallels b/w cancer cancer, the pandemic, & climate change.
In the U.S., the "rosy picture" differs by political ideology.
Today in the NEJM: The conservative rosy picture is that COVID is like a cold or the flu. The liberal rosy picture is that leaders are doing just fine by pushing vax-and-relax.
Second, a lot of people can sustain a strong denial of reality about the ongoing pandemic during lulls. They suppress the existence of COVlD waves and excess deaths, disability, and retirements.
During waves, those defenses burst. Loss of control = anger...
Third, a lot of people (many reading this) understand COVlD correctly & experience righteous indignation during COVlD waves. We quite reasonably do not like all of the unjust and gratuitous suffering.
I find it helpful to channel that intensity into helping other people....
🚩🚩🚩
As a vigorous defender of #CDC data, their switch from using normalized to non-normalized COVlD wastewater surveillance data today harms data quality.
"Normalizing" means accounting for basic confounders like rain levels. It is a choice to use worse data.
1/5🧵
Historically, the CDC data have correlated near-perfectly with similar metrics, such as Biobot's wastewater estimates (still active) or the IHME true case estimates (through mid-2023).
The changes reduce those correlations. It's like going from an A+ to a B.
2/5🧵
You can readily see the loss of data quality in the PMC "whole pandemic" graph (preview shown, subject to change) with choppier waves, caused by the CDC adding extra noise to the data and applying retroactively from BA.1 Omicron to present.
U.S. CDC numbers just released. Good news (for those not in Louisiana). "Only" a 5% national increase.
2025 has closely tracked with summer 2023 transmission. A 12-13% increase would have been expected based on those numbers. That said...
real-time data have been prone to retroactive corrections. This is frustrating, of course, because it leaves people making decisions based on data that are only of good quality when 2 weeks old.
If we saw a 12% increase this week, I'd say look at 2023 for a glimpse...
at the future. Instead, I would consider these plausible scenarios:
🔹Wave still similar to 2023
🔹Later wave with schools more implicated
🔹Something temporarily much better