The USA is acting as if we were through with COVID; as if were a thing of the past. Unfortunately COVID, like the past itself, is not through with us. The newest sub-variant of Omicron (BA.5) is the most contagious variant yet. An area of special concern is that the contagion does not appear to be significantly deterred by either inoculation or previous infection.

New Cases:

After a plateau of substantial length in which the number of cases hovered right around 100,000 per day, the number has again started to climb steadily in the States, and is now at 133,000. That represents 400 per million population, which is nearly triple the red line. 49 of the 50 states are in the red zone, excepting only Vermont.

Positivity:

The nation’s current positivity rate is 17%, nearly double the red line. Five states are in the 30s, topped by Missouri (35%) and Mississippi (33%). Seventeen more are in the 20s, and twenty-four more are in the 10-19 range. That leaves only four states in the green zone (Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire).

Other national trends:

In the past fourteen days:

  • COVID fatalities are up 10%
  • COVID hospitalizations are up 18%
  • The number of COVID patients in ICU is up 22%

International trends:

The number of cases is rising even more rapidly overseas. As of mid-June, the global number of daily COVID cases had fallen to about 550,000 per day (7-day average). In just a month, it has climbed back up in the 900,000 range.

Only one country, New Zealand, is in the quadruple danger zone (cases rising, cases already in the red zone, fatalities rising, fatalities already in the red zone), but several countries in Asia and Europe appear on the first three of those lists, and some of them are nearing crisis conditions:

  • Cases in Japan and South Korea are doubling weekly.
  • Australia, Italy, and Singapore have new infection rates at 10 times the red line, and are still increasing.
  • In the cases of Australia and Italy, fatality rates are already near the red zone, and are increasing rapidly.

11 thoughts on “A COVID update

  1. As a country, we did everything wrong, from the very beginning. We haven’t really drawn the right answers despite this long experience.

    NZ is an example of a country that, largely due to its small size & isolation, was able to execute a successful restriction of infection. But they’re now suffering from their inability to follow up that big first step with the necessary next step of blanket vaccination with the near-magically efficacious injections that were developed.

    Drug efficacy & diagnostic fidelity are the modern magic of today’s medical industry. I mean this disparagingly. It’s true, the specific questions asked in a survey should influence our interpretation of responses. But what supposed experts fail to understand is that data quality is foremost about sampling. PCR was a perfect solution to the wrong problem.

    Breadth & penetration of testing. Efficient data gathering. Detailed maps of where the virus was. This can, with a public whose attitude is cooperative, empower us with an ability to corral the dispersion. Sensitivity, with its goal of diagnostic precision, totally missed the point. Our policy was in effect to surrender in advance to limiting infection. Lockdowns were not an attempt to do just that. They were a desperate response to too much ignorance.

    Our public-private efforts towards vaccines & treatments combined the worst of both spheres. We killed the private sector’s main advantage of competition by picking winners & squashing the many alternative teams who wanted to get into the game. The cost of casting a wide net would’ve been trivial next to what we did spend granting monopoly power to hand-picked winners. What if we’d lost that bet? Instead of the natural haste of a free market, we’d have had to rush headlong into untried & ill-considered alternatives.

    In the absence of official seriousness, an impatient public stretched its arms to every gleam of hope, like ivermectin. It was a shit show, precipitated by a blinkered government bureaucracy’s ineptitude.

    One by one, we learned the little lessons. Yes, as it turned out, the virus is transmitted thru the air. Yes, ventilation is key & outdoors transmission is neglible. Yes, masks work. Good masks, better. But, first, these things were all known, or knowable with relatively little effort. And, the big things we did wrong, we remain in no position to correct. Regardless of what we think about monkeypox or what else confronts us next. Not that COVID-19 is anywhere near a done deal yet.

    As Scoopy says, an infection rate isn’t a worry in & of itself. What’s dangerous is our risk from letting contagion randomly climb the severity wall unhindered.

  2. Thank god people are ok with deaths caused by the flu otherwise none of us would ever be able to leave the house.

    1. It’s important to realize the difference in magnitude. Even now, when we consider it relatively under control, COVID is four times more deadly than the flu.

      In a typical year, the flu causes some 35,000 fatalities in the USA. In contrast, even the relatively benign Omicron variant, even now at its current “low” level of 400 per day, is killing people at the rate of about 150,000 per year. And our view of that is “Hey, we beat this thing.” (Well, it is better than the 4,000 per day who died at peak COVID.)

      1. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. I mean, fight the good fight and all that, but just don’t expect too much.

        If COVID had done nothing else, it’s brought into crystal-clear clarity who the true morons among us are.

  3. Thank you for continuing to follow this story!

    If you look at the number of new infections per day, not worrying about percentages, there are definite waves where the infections increase to a peak, and then drop to a baseline. Omicron peaked at around 3.5 to 4 million new cases per day, whereas the previous three peaked at under a million. This current wave is now at around 1.3 million, and not showing any signs of slowing, and this is with North America and other areas under-reporting.

    Here’s a quick graph using this data, showing the new infections reported that day, no smoothing, or any other manipulations.

  4. I work in a hospital and most of the COVID positives are from people coming in for something else and then testing positive. They are either asymptomatic or have minor symptoms that they think are allergies ect.
    One of our employee’s had to have emergency surgery and had been working with the staff all day then test positive before having his procedure.
    Our ICU has not seen COVID complications in months and we were the epicenter of our state when it hit.

  5. The problem is talking percentages.

    They’re up 10%. From what? From what were very, very low numbers.

    The thing about ba.5 is that it still hasn’t really proven to be extremely effective against existing vaccinations. Can you get it if you’re vaxxed and boosted? Sure, just like omicron, which it’s a variant of. But the vaccination still protects you from severe disease.

    So get your boosters and don’t panic. This is actually good news. Ba.5 is the winner. The CDC told the vaccine makers to tune their fall boosters for it, and they are. September/October and they’ll have specific boosters for it. That means total protection, not just “oh it’ll be better”.

    And that, my friends, means we’re closer to shutting this thing down. It’ll become an endemic that’s annoying. We’re almost there now, that’ll finish the job.

    1. The major concern now is the high rate of transmission, and not necessarily because of the effects of the variant itself. While this variant is not particularly malignant, and the world could live with it or its similar derivatives forever, or at least until a variant-specific inoculation becomes available, that’s not the immediate center of concern, which is that more transmission = more mutation, and each mutation represents danger anew. The recent evolution of the virus has produced variants and sub-variants progressively more contagious and less malevolent, but it’s not possible to predict what’s behind door number three.

      Not that we can do very much about it.

      Mutation aside, caution is always wise, even in dealing with this relatively mild sub-variant. It’s not time for a victory lap. There are warning signs in places like Japan and South Korea, where the transmission numbers are starting to look terrifying. Japan’s infection rate zoomed overnight all the way to the peak of the previous Omicron steeple, and is still accelerating.

      image host

      The newest wave in Japan may not produce massive fatality or hospitalization numbers there because their inoculation rate is good, thus warding off the most serious effects of the virus, but if a similar pattern happens in the USA, it could be dangerous for some regions because of the lower vax rates.

  6. And all this time I thought the media was trying to hype up monkeypox. Or whatever the politically correct name is going to be.

    1. Monkeypox was never a thing. Ever. Pure hype. There’s a vaccine, it’s treatable, and it’s hard to pass on.

      This isn’t cause for alarm as much as the paywall story likes to say, see my comment.

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