A few days ago, I stumbled upon an exchange between @michaelsfuhrer, @greg_travis, @karencutter4, @PienaarJm.

The crux is Greg’s claim of a sharp increase from 2022 to 2023 in 18-44yo deaths from disease in the US (his graphic below).

Greg is wrong.

Join me on a 12-pack 🧵 2/ It quickly became apparent that the main point of contention was whether including R99-coded deaths (“Other ill-defined and unspecified causes of mortality”) in Greg's definition of deaths from disease, as they are later re-coded to non-disease deaths.

Weekly #Covid19 update in my Substack newsletter, The Issue. Just click the link below.

I'll excerpt a few portions below, but the upshot is: steady rise in cases/% positive, lower rise in Hosps, even lower for ICUs, and continued decline in deaths.
thelawyercraig.substack.com/p/covid-19-wee… "Despite the rise in other metrics, deaths late last week dropped below 300 (7-day-average) for the first time since June/July 2021. ICU census is still well below pre-Omicron pandemic lows."

I cannot overstate the absolute idiocy of touting this study purporting to show Omicron is just as likely to send someone to the hospital or the morgue as Delta.

There are 2 enormous issues with this study (among others, I'm sure).

Thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1522418146409209856

2/ ISSUE #1: The authors use PCR positives as the case denominator and just assume that the "case-to-infection" ratio was similar between all 4 periods. Unbelievable.

The fact that a study can look at the data and just say this boggles my mind. Just read that green highlighting!

#Covid19 in South Africa...5th wave? Well, that depends on what metric you use to define wave.

Thread 🧵🧵🧵 2/ If you look at 7DA cases, it's a clear increase. It's a long way off from the OG Omicron peak (and not quite as vertical), but they're still up ~4x in barely over 2 weeks.

Heading your way, Music City. Just realized this will be my first maskless flight since Covid hit.

Guess it's time for a #Covid19 data update, seeing as how tweets like Taylor Lorenz's below can somehow still exist as of this morning.

Thread 🧵🧵🧵 2/ CASES (7-day-average, @CDCgov data)

Current: 25,980 as of 3/31
Peak: 806,571 on 1/15/22

Down 96.8% from peak. Currently in a plateau-ish trough nationally, but rising in the Northeast right now (as many of us predicted).

How to lie with #Covid19 data, part 4379.

The good doctor knows this death spike is the product of Denmark's coding process. They assign *every* death within 30 days of a +PCR test as a Covid death. This is what this graph shows, and Ding knows it. How do I know he knows...? Because 3 weeks ago, he was touting Denmark's "surging excess deaths" as the harbinger of BA.2 doom. Just look at that red circle! Get ready for the Ding rocket-emoji express, right?

The US #Covid19 ICU census keeps plummeting, now at 7,049. We never saw a number that low before late spring last year. It took us until May 19 to drop below that number. Let's take a look at all the metrics...

🧵🧵🧵Thread 2/ The 7-day % positive is lower than any time during the pandemic except the May-July 2021 lull (pre-Delta). Recent numbers "breathe" a bit, but the CDC's showing 4.1% as of 2/27.

Halftime teleporting me straight back to high school and undergrad. Get on our level, Gen Z. Young millennials, don’t try to co-opt this era either. If you weren’t driving with a portable CD player on the center console playing these songs while the passenger was on “prevent skip” duty, this was not yours. Gen X and geriatric millennials only.

Want to see what long-tailed death reporting looks like? Let's look at Missouri. MO has reported 384 deaths in the past week (confirmed and probable, per NYT), with 272 of those falling on 2/8, reported yesterday. When did those deaths occur? Quite a while ago.

Thread 🧵🧵🧵 2/ Only 23 of these deaths occurred during the current week, and only 28 occurred the week before. So, 51/384 deaths reported from 2/3-2/9 occurred after January 26. That's 13.3%.

I know we can't fire up the DeLorean and see what never masking a child would've looked like, but we can try. For example, we can see that several Euro nations never masked the younger cohorts, and we can assume they weren't eugenicists. But that doesn't persuade.

Thread 🧵🧵🧵 2/ We can see that a study from the Catalan schools (Spain) showed that transmission increased with age, and that the youngest cohort showed the lowest transmission despite being the only unmasked group. But that doesn't persuade.

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1420765698746322949?s=20&t=tpuEx_ZIS8naMPKw6Eb3-A

Now that seasonality has become part of the accepted #Covid19 discourse, might be worth giving this piece of mine from 6+ months ago a read:
thelawyercraig.substack.com/p/our-covid-me… "The arc is clear: the dark days of 2020 gave way to the halcyon days of fall 2021. Kids in schools. Packed sports stadiums. Buzzing restaurants and bars. It’s all coming, and soon. But how will we remember what took place in between? Inaccurately, I suspect."

Now that the #Covid19 summer wave has ended, let's compare 2020 & 2021 summers (@CDCgov data, trough to trough, 20-day lag for deaths):

2020: 4.6M cases, 78.6M tests, 5.85% pos, 102.1K deaths, 2.22% CFR

2021: 12.5M cases, 163.1M tests, 7.67% pos, 163.3K deaths, 1.30% CFR Perhaps most surprising is that our % positive was higher in 2021 than 2020 (when testing wasn't quite fully ramped up or as ubiquitous). I think that just shows how much of a mover Delta was, and how it snuck into even "off-season" locales more easily.

Data that we're missing when comparing #Covid19 cases in the vaccinated and unvaccinated is the frequency of testing each cohort. I typically see 5x-7x lower rates (Cases/100K) touted for vaccinated, but isn't systemic testing (schools, etc.) skewed heavily toward unvaccinated? I had a thread a while back questioning claims that vaccination does *nothing* for transmission, as I found that unlikely based on both the data and studies. But I'll admit that I over-simplified the data by showing state comparisons like these:

https://twitter.com/TheLawyerCraig/status/1443255244675235840?s=20

An old friend of mine has been a Southwest Airlines pilot for years. We came up together in the same Air Force fighter squadron and served two combat deployments together. An eminently pragmatic and decent dude. So I reached out for his thoughts on recent events…

Thread🧵🧵🧵 2/ To make things easy and protect his anonymity (so I don’t have to keep calling him “dude”), I’m going to give him a call sign for this thread that was not his real call sign in our squadron. His call sign for this thread: “Doom”

By now we've captured the #Covid19 summer wave national peaks. Data below, along with a couple thoughts on what might be next.

Brief thread 🧵🧵🧵 2/ #Covid19 7DA summer wave peak figures and dates (@CDCgov data):

8/12 - % Positive (10.43%)
8/26 - % of ED Visits w/Covid (7.36%)
8/27 - Hosp admissions (12,294)
9/1 - Cases (161,496)
9/3 - Hosp census (94,373)
9/15 - Deaths (1,767)

2/x

Lately, it seems like there has been mass acceptance that the only benefit to the #Covid19 vaccine is reduced severity post-infection, and that the vaccines do nothing to blunt transmission in the age of the #DeltaVariant. The comparator data I see shows otherwise.

🧵Thread🧵 First, I think the Provincetown outbreak was a stake in the ground, and the way public health authorities and the media framed it and Delta helped bring “Uh oh, vaccines don’t affect transmission” to wide acceptance. That genie hasn’t really gone back in the bottle since.

2/x

Is this @CDCgov study just lining up counties irrespective of region and classifying as either mandated or not? Where do we think most of the non-mandate districts are located? Perhaps in places already riding a rocket upwards? A couple ideas to confirm this exciting mask news...

https://twitter.com/CDCgov/status/1441476284723367939

Lets take all the counties from the study and separate them into

(1) Masks mandated & located south of 37th parallel
(2) No mandate & located north of 37th parallel

I mean, it apparently doesn't matter where the schools are located, so (1) should be the clear winner, yes?

Eager to see the lay of the land next week. Current #Covid19 7DA Peaks (CDC Data):

8/22 - % of ED Visits w/Covid (tied 8/22 - 8/25)
8/23 - % Positive
8/27 - New Hosp admissions
9/01 - Cases
9/01 - Hosp census (single day)
9/02 - Deaths
9/03 - Hosp census (7DA)

🧵Thread🧵 We moved from a Delta rise in the mid-South to the southern states, to a broader rise (while early movers flattened) combined with an increased *capturing* of cases throughout August with massive test increases. The circles below are tests mid-July to end of Aug in 2020 vs. 2021.

Analogy re #Covid19 + vaccines:

Covid = revolver w/100k chambers. Age & health determine # of bullets (very serious illness or death), rubber bullets (shit still sucks), and blanks (mild or asymptomatic infection). Vax replaces bullets w/blanks, but the gun will eventually fire. We might have hoped that vaccines would act like a bulletproof vest, but that's not the case. There still is evidence that they delay the revolver firing though, which is good if you don't want to hang out in the hospital during the time when it's firing at everyone else too.

Folks, I urge a little caution with the Florida #Covid19 numbers showing on the CDC right now. FL reports its Sat+Sun+Mon numbers on Mondays, which the CDC *usually* updates on Tuesday for the 3-day span (and divides the total by 3).

Please read this brief thread... For whatever reason (maybe an earlier report time?), it appears that the CDC used FL's 3-day total of 56,633, which they would normally report as 18,878/day for the 3-day span. The CDC hasn't updated FL's #'s on Monday for a while. Here's how the days usually end up: