Infections starting to decline again after a plateau in the first few weeks of Feb. Should continue to trend down for the next few weeks. Current estimates:
🔸440,000 new infections/day
🔸~1 in 76 currently infected
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🧵 My favorite new scientific tool to observe the universe does what no other telescope can. It *LISTENS TO THE SOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE*
LIGO, (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) are 8km long L shaped detectors that measures mirror length to 1/10,000 of a proton
All other telescopes observe the EM spectrum (different wavelengths of light, from gamma ray to radio waves.) This is different, as if detects the rumbles of space time when big collisions happen. Neutron stars on collision course disturb space time to such an extent that it..
It sends "sound" waves all the way through the universe, not using air as the medium, but the fabric of space time at the speed of light. When it arrives at earth, LIGO measures the disturbance. Between the 3 (2 in the US and 1 in Italy) it can pinpoint where the sound came from
I still see frequent posts on here about how "easy" it would be to send covid to extinction via just everyone wearing masks and/or temporary lockdowns. It's poorly thought out logic, borderlining on fantasy. I'll explain why below:0/4🧵
1) Mask mandates and restaurant/bar lockdown across the world. About 5% of the population would get behind that, and only maybe 60% were behind it when it was killing 120-200x more people per week than today.
2) Impoverished countries:. You're going to force remote villages in west and central Africa, SE asia to abide by the new decree? Create travel bans from there? Good luck on all of that (including racial specific bans?!)
XFG* looks to me like the likely summer wave generator. From modeling NY growth:
🔸️~65% wkly advantage
🔸️Fastest since JN.1 or KP.2
🔸️Slower than the combo of KP.2/KP.3/KP.3.1.1
🔸️Dominance in NY within 2 weeks
🔸️Dominance in US in June
I focused on New York state because XFG* is far ahead there relative to anywhere else, and they still have a lot of sequencing. It will take some time to evaluate it in other places to confirm the growth rates.
I used @RajlabN 's Tableau to determine sequence frequencies over time. Thanks Raj
I'm not sure if we'll get quite as low in transmission this spring as the minimums the last 2 years because of a very low winter peak not as efficiently cleaning up the susceptables. A bit of uncharted territory, since immunity is waning but we don't have strong variant growth.
Even without a strongly growing variant, I'm still confident we will have a decently sized summer wave. Parts of the south and west basically had no wave at all in the winter, thus the susceptibility is slowly increasing.
But the question is, how long will the decline hold on until we start the summer increase without a new fast variant? If the decline hangs on until late May or June, we may get below 2023/24's lows.
We witnessed a huge weekly growth advantage in new variants for the first year after Omicron arrived, and then to a lesser extent after Pirola. Now we have 9 months of the lowest growth advantages since 2020. 🧵
Both Alpha and Delta had only moderate divergence from their predecessors, but they increased transmission in a time with a mountain of people with no immunity to severe disease. Their waves of cases were moderate, but the waves of death and hospitalization were huge.
Omicron came in and wiped more than half of immunity to infection without heavily impacting resistances to severe disease. What it also did was open up a lot of new evolutionary potential for immune escape, and BA.2, BA.5, and XBBs demonstrate that impact well