Covid 19 CRISIS

The one thing that we should've learned, is to actually go and check sources. And the annoying fact that sometimes, reputable news outlets are about as dependable as that one guy on Twitter. In fact, they are now mostly just relaying that one guy from Twitter.

Alas, it seems that one we actually did not learn collectively.
 
So the UK now is reporting reinfections in their covid dashboard, since with Omicron's (partial) immune escape these have gone up from under two to ten percent of daily cases. This was to be expected.
This does not mean 10% of daily cases got Omicron twice. People are known to intermittently test PCR-positive for weeks after an infection as the body gets rid of dead virus junk (there was a very public case with a Swedish athlete who weeks after recovery had a positive blip when entering China for the Olympics). This is why at least 90 days have to pass between positive tests to be counted as a reinfection. 90 days before today, Omicron was not in the UK yet, so this is all Delta recoveries reinfected with Omicron.
 
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First study on BA.1 Omicron vs. BA.2 super Omicron from Denmark shows that BA.2 is better at spreading than BA.1, but with a caveat: While it is even better than BA.1 at infecting vaccinated people, those in return are less likely to further spread BA.2 than BA.1.
And while I keep reading in the press about BA.2 reinfecting people just recovered from BA.1, this did not happen in this study of 20.000 cases (2.000 of which were BA.2 primary cases), making reinfection a fringe phenomenon at best.

EDIT: Israel reportedly has caught a "single digit" amount of Omicron-on-Omicron reinfections. With almost half a million cases over the last week, we can with confidence call that "fringe".
 
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The great “What if?” of this pandemic is, IMHO, what would have happened if governments had taken the virus seriously at an early stage and then cooperated to fight it.

But instead, we’re burdened with mismanagement, chaotic rule making and terrible communication. My COVID app can’t even display my “status” correctly and the charts (yes…) explaining the definitions of the German 3G, 3G+, 2G and 2G+ statuses are unreliable because local and state governments can decide on significant rule changes for the largest group of people, the ones with a booster shot. As the icing on the cake, 3G+ is some sort of half-official in-between thing that hardly anyone (including government websites) is even aware of.

On the international level, governments across the EU cannot even agree on what to call the EU digital COVID certificate. It is a “Sanitary Pass” in France, a “Green Pass” or even a “Super Green Pass” in Italy and a “Corona Certificate” in most other countries. Which, of course, have their own rules and/or names for the rules on access to restaurants, clubs and shops.
 
This Monday's Uusimaa data update comes with a weird data blip observation.

This is the actual data pulled from THL's files:
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As you can see, covid cases declined "only" 18% compared to 25% week over week last time over. And one day, we even got an increase in case count.

But if you look at the week-over-week graphs, it's not last week's data that's off, but there's one sequence-breaking dip on January 26th. So if we do some very dirty normalizing and replace the actual positive tests of January 26th by the average between the Wednesdays before and after, the picture looks like that:
v1.jpg

Percentage decline slightly accelerating, absolute number decline steady. So, what do we learn from that? Data is about trends and one day of weird data does not change the bigger picture, so we learn nothing much except for the cleaned version looking prettier at the expense of not showing reality.

Hospital occupancy also dropped: 258 people in normal wards (-49/-16%), ICUs stand at 15 (-7/-32%).

Nationwide weekend numbers meanwhile went up to 19898 again, so the wave indeed is making it's way North, but is declining in the bigger picture (still below Omicron peaks) nevertheless. I am massively looking forward to the end of restrictions and getting back to business as usual-ish, currently planned in three weeks' time.
 
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Numbers are finally going down for Austin. C'mon, keep dropping. Stef wants to Lemons Rally.
 
Interesting times on the vaccine front - a study of the Moderna Omicron booster in apes shows no measurable difference in protection compared to an OG Moderna booster. Scientists theorize this may be due to "antigenic original sin" or "imprinting" after all - the immune system being overly focused on the original version of a virus to make antibodies to a relatively similar version.
If this would be true, it would be disastrous for Moderna's stock, since it would bring the "mix of vaccination and breakthrough infection" approach favored by experts like Germany's Christian Drosten into more of a focus, and give some backing to those countries opening up since Omicron is relatively mild, and certainly not really dangerous, among the vaccinated (Germany's leading feminist columnist Margarete Stokowski was bedridden with Omicron for two weeks and now is hate-fuled towards anyone calling it "mild" - yet it was mild enough to allow her to tweet about how angry she is daily).
On the other hand though, Pfizer showed data proving that even the Alpha variant booster they never deployed increases Omicron-specific antibodies 4,5 times compared to the standard booster. If this proves true for the Omicron booster as well, it may well be that the reason for Moderna's results is not antigenic original sin, but that the Moderna booster sucks. But since Pfizer only showed that data thrown on a PowerPoint slide, we'll have to wait for an actual paper, or at least a press release.
 
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Fascinating news from a mixed state.


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Well, ok then, if that many people are either no longer testing or the infection rate really is dropping that fast, I'm all for it.
 
Meanwhile, for some strange reason, it seems we are the last of our friends not catching it, next family down.
Well down, the wife has a sore throat and my friend had a cough for one day (!), both 4x vaccinated now (doctors).
Kids (4 and 1,5) had nothing and were negative.

I personally enjoy seeing life coming back into the city, restaurants filling again, people enjoying life again. I also go to restaurants and bars (which are open, because they offer warmed up frozen pizza and therefore are a restaurant, not a bar) again. One party of our coalition now also lobbies to stop the restrictions since hospitals are just doing fine.

It's ridiculous, last year, we said if the 7 day cases are above 35/100.000 inhabitants, we close everything down. Right now we are at 2400/100.000 and everything is open, no corpses on the streets, hospitals are doing fine, my friend's friend is in the Covid station in Munich as a doctor and says basically people coming into Covid station by now are almost 99% unvaccinated, he had only one vaccinated guy die on him, and that guy had asthma and was in chemo therapy. So yeah. Omicron is a slightly more annoying flu 99% of times, so I hope our politicians follow fellow other countries and stop this shit and let it run.
 
It's ridiculous, last year, we said if the 7 day cases are above 35/100.000 inhabitants, we close everything down. Right now we are at 2400/100.000 and everything is open
That's not ridiculous, it's the vaccines working. :)

Let's ride this Omikron wave out wearing masks and 2G for a few weeks more, and then open up already.
 
Each time I look at the infection graph for Illinois, I’m still impressed how we’ve reacted each time. Slight bump in the road (March 2020), lock everything down, nobody’s out doing anything. July/august 2020, more panic again but hardly a change in how things were going here. People out and worked, went to the events that were happening. November 2020, major panic, but again not much IRL changed. Just noisy news anchors and hospitals now doing some light triage. 2021, seemingly all waves weren’t noticed and things are “normal” again. Most people in the suburbs and in Chicago wore masks in buildings during all of this. Once I left the city-folk area, people gave two shits and continued life as normal. I’ve never been heckled for wearing a mask, I would get the occasional annoyed look by people, and once was treated like I didn’t exist at a local O’Reilly auto parts store. But what we saw in news reports where grown adults were yelling at workers, getting dragged off planes, I never personally witnessed it. During 2020-2021 I still traveled quite a bit for work, so this isn’t like I never went anywhere. East coast, south East, Midwestern states. The same story, city people adhere to the rules in place, rural people didn’t. It is disturbing how cut and dry it remains.

And it didn’t matter what country either. During ringmeet, the same thing happened, except when we were in grocery stores. That was the big difference. Whereas here if I’m in say, landing Michigan or some other smaller town, didn’t matter where you went, no mask indoors compared with what I saw during ringmeet.
 
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