Just a lighthearted observation from a country mouse.
Fun fact: tuberculosis killed 1.5M people in 2018. Higher than the current covid death count.
Another fun tuberculosis fact. Thomas Holmes in the 50s/60s showed that stress led to worse outcomes in tuberculosis patients.
Yup, when you got TB it’s best to just lay back and enjoy the ride.
Thanks. I saw the same thing in an article in “the economist” this morning.
In addition to all the things you say, the Oxford AZ trial has been testing participants for asymptomatic cases. So its results aren’t comparable to the results from the Moderna and Pfizer trials. The Oxford results may actually be better, especially in the “low first dose” arm.
The low first dose arm only has a couple thousand people. Unfortunately the error bars on the data from that arm are going to be huge for a while yet, so we really just can’t know.
I started a thread asking how it will work, but except for bump, the response has been underwhelming. Maybe it’s just a big unknown at this point.
Yes, the two really big difference are:
- City dwellers weren’t intentionally taking additional TB risk. There was no politically motivated “let’s ignore the TB risk” movement in the cities.
- The rural TB sanatoriums didn’t prevent rural people from getting access to care for either TB or anything else.
In 2018, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.5 million deaths.
Covid-19 cases, year-to-date: 59,514,826 total cases, 1,402,028 dead
I expect that by the end of the year Covid-19 will catch up(if not pass) that 2018 tuberculosis rate, and let us not forget the fact that tuberculosis has been going on for many years, while Covid-19 shot up to where it is now in less than a year.
Yes. TB has been around “many years”. Lol. Since the dawn of history.
And one can only imagine what the number would have been without active mitigation strategies. While there is some multidrug resistance, most TB strains respond to antibiotics. There is currently no highly effective and cheap treatment against the novel coronavirus except maintenance of the disease until we get a vaccine.
And most importantly, TB is mostly only in shithole countries!
We seem to be doing pretty well today. The new daily reported high cases from November 23 are in:
Washington
Oregon
Ohio
Delaware
Virginia
Kansas
Oklahoma
Puerto Rico
Really
Seven states plus Puerto Rico. That’s it.
Of course, several had new highs on November 22, and most had highs within the week before that, but I’ll take what good news I can find. This is a hopeful sign.
I just hope that the potential superspreader that is Thanksgiving doesn’t wipe it out.
Sorry to deflate, but look at the weekly cycle - you are looking at the weekly low point.
Compare the weekly low points against each other across several weeks - the trend is very much upward.
Check it tomorrow and you will see.
No, I’m looking at the seven day average, not the weekly low.A seven-day average ought to average out the weekly cycle of highs and lows.
Most trends are, indeed up, but right now a significant number of them are moving downwards. I expect that this would only be temporary, even without what I expect to be a new upward spike after Thanksgiving.
Another fun fact - only 542 of those people lived in the USA. Living in a first world country has its advantages.
I propose a slight amendment to your otherwise fine post:
… Living in a first world country usually has its advantages.
Sometimes we fall short. Sometimes we even fall short on purpose. :smack:
The mrna material will be much easier to produce, but it’s still got to be put into vials. And that hasn’t suddenly ramped up with new technology. There is no existing technology to get vaccines out of the vat, into people, faster than they do flu vaccines every year.
Even with all the factories doing double shifts for all the vaccines, most of America will not be vaccinated next year. Maybe enough Americans, but not most Americans.
Would you care to show your work here? I’m just interested in how you estimated this.