NYC officials expected a modest smoke plume to sweep through the area Friday night -- and it did. gothamist.com/news/modest-sm… Thankfully, the rain helped dampen things, but the city still recorded a moderate bump in AQI around 10 pm.
gothamist.com/news/modest-sm…

A Lancet preprint looks at omicron's severity in its early epicenter, Gauteng, South Africa

Many are discussing the overall result: This wave experienced much less severe disease than past waves.

But the age breakdowns tell a slightly different story... papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Cases: In past waves, people younger than 39 (blue) made up ~50% of cases.

With omicron, they accounted for 67% in this study.

We know that young adults fare better than older ones with COVID, which could be lowering overall severity with the latest wave.

Welp, that escalated quickly.

Omicron now makes up 92% of sequenced cases in the New York and New Jersey region, based on the latest data from the CDC. That's up from the 13% reported last week.

Nationally, omicron is 73%, up from 12% reported last week.
covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra… Some important context for this rapid rise:

1. I mentioned to @Steronious on @WNYC this weekend that we might eventually learn that omicron arrived here well before its first detection, based on evidence from overseas... wnyc.org/story/gov-hoch…

NY reported another 21,908 COVID positives on Saturday — breaking a record for the 2nd day in a row.

But these milestones don't mean the state has reached its worst peak. Far from it...and some signs point to improvement.

Me for @WNYC/@Gothamist
gothamist.com/news/ny-breaks… Indeed, the U.S. COVID outbreak could be transitioning into an endemic — where the coronavirus would continue to thrive in perpetuity, but vaccinated people would be largely spared the worst outcomes.
gothamist.com/news/ny-breaks…

If You’ve Had Covid, Do You Need the Vaccine? ✍️: ⁦@apoorva_nyc⁩

Spoiler: Yep nytimes.com/2021/10/12/hea… “Some consistent patterns have emerged: Two doses of an mRNA vaccine produce more antibodies, and more reliably, than an infection with the coronavirus does.”

nytimes.com/2021/10/12/hea…

Today @NYCMayor de Blasio told @BrianLehrer that @WNYC/@Gothamist's recent series on ventilation in @NYCSchools is inaccurate

He should read our latest:

NYC Officials Say School Windows Can Always Offer Solid Ventilation. Independent Scientists Disagree
gothamist.com/news/nyc-offic… And as a fun exercise in science media literacy, let's break down the Mayor's response...

NYC Approves 4,000 Classrooms For In-Person Schooling Despite Unreliable Ventilation

Part 2 of our look at the city's back-to-school COVID precautions...

✍️: @clewisreports for @WNYC / @Gothamist
gothamist.com/news/nyc-appro… Looking through building surveys conducted by NYC's Department of Education, @jeffwilen found thousands of classrooms have been cleared for occupancy despite relying exclusively on functioning windows for ventilation.

She even made an interactive map.🙏🙌
gothamist.com/news/nyc-appro…

“In addition, the [Intelligence Committee] was able to reach broad agreement on several other key issues. We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon…” dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc… “Most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered; however, two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.” dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

Vaccine mandates now that Pfizer-BioNTech is fully approved in U.S... Pentagon to mandate COVID-19 vaccine for military thehill.com/policy/defense…

Every now and again, @NYMag's @intelligencer decides to publish COVID misinformation.

The latest example comes courtesy of @davidzweig and centers around masking for kids.

It makes the same tired arguments that I've been hearing for months now. Let's take a look... Zweig starts by misrepresenting a single study from Georgia that looked at 90K students/169 schools (cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…).

He insinuates that the study found no protection with masking for students.

In truth, student masking reduced COVID incidence by 21%...

Big ol’ scoop by @yabutaleb7 @JoelAchenbach ⁦@Carolynyjohnson⁩ washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07… “One of the slides states that there is a higher risk among older age groups for hospitalization and death relative to younger people, regardless of vaccination status. Another estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans”

Here is the issue with Leonhardt’s takes on public health and COVID:

They often misconstrue data, don’t see the bigger picture and can mislead people… (a thread)

https://twitter.com/DLeonhardt/status/1420122854516051969

First, I’m surprised that anyone (without an agenda) can look at this national map and essentially say “You know what? Some parts of this country are going to be alright.”

I mean, it looks like a scene from the “Floor Is Lava”

News reports are suggesting that the J&J vaccine is less effective based off a new antibody study (preprint).

But the preprint’s results don’t match real-world findings.

And I would argue that these headlines don’t match the preprint’s results either... I say that because:

1) The preprint didn't measure effectiveness but rather the antibodies’ abilities to neutralize variants

2) The preprint reported a reduction in J&J neutralization for all variants, not just delta and including the parental virus. 🧐 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

NYC Unions' Vote (Today) Could Force Government Retirees Onto Privatized Health Insurance

✍️: @clewisreports via @WNYC / @Gothamist

gothamist.com/news/nyc-union… “The move will affect some 250,000 municipal retirees, hundreds of whom marched in protest against the changes in Manhattan last week in the midst of a heat wave.” gothamist.com/news/nyc-union…

“Half-truths and distorted information have obscured an accurate accounting of the lab's functions and activities, which were more routine than how they’ve been portrayed in the media, she said.” bloomberg.com/news/features/… “The concrete, bunker-style building has the highest biosafety designation, and requires air, water and waste to be filtered and sterilized before it leaves the facility.” bloomberg.com/news/features/…

To gauge what might happen going forward with the delta variant, @WNYC / @Gothamist asked virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists to break down how the delta variant could affect New Yorkers based on their vaccine status.
gothamist.com/news/why-the-d… The answer seems pretty straightforward for the unvaccinated, courtesy of @theodora_nyc...
gothamist.com/news/why-the-d…

Unlike the conversations about masks and variants, this time, the evidence for a lab leak hasn’t changed. Which is to say: there isn’t any yet.

“I think almost everybody agrees that the facts are very thin.” -@mlipsitch

🎯: @MaddieOBender v @motherboard
vice.com/en/article/n7b… "This is about the bounds of what's worth following up as a possibility, which is different from a standard scientific debate. It's how to interpret the scantiness of the evidence, rather than how to interpret the evidence.” - @mlipsitch vice.com/en/article/n7b…

Widespread Hunger Persists For Many Families In New York Even As The Economy Recovers

✍️: @clewisreports and our new data reporter @jeffwilen (!!!)

via @WNYC / @Gothamist
gothamist.com/food/widesprea… About 12% of adults statewide aren’t getting enough to eat from week to week, according to the latest rolling survey from @nys_health. That’s only down slightly from a mid-pandemic peak of approximately 14%. gothamist.com/food/widesprea…

@justinulysses @BeeBrookshire @Anna_Rothschild @amymaxmen The most vocal proponents of lab leak consistently posit lab manipulation of some variety.

Why?

Because as far as we know Shi Zheng-Li’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected bat samples from 2010-2015... @justinulysses @BeeBrookshire @Anna_Rothschild @amymaxmen If those field teams had caught SARS-CoV-2 back then, it should have sparked outbreaks years ago.

Ok, so what’s left?

The WIV team safely brought SARS2 (or a close relative) back to their lab between 2010-2015 but then was experimenting with it in 2019. This is a long shot...

@MMKavanagh That’s why that paragraph in @KatherineEban’s VF story is so misleading:

BSL-3 labs are specifically designed to study respiratory pathogens like SARS-CoV-2. cdc.gov/training/quick… @MMKavanagh @KatherineEban People study anthrax in BSL-3 labs. Anthrax! ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53535…

Plus BSL-4 labs are built upon the principles of BSL-3.

Fauci’s reply in the first email listed among BuzzFeed’s 3,200-pg FOIA is my mental response to just so many emails... +1 on @DrJAshton. Great medical reporter.