It may have been raised elsewhere, but Jan 15th marks the anniversary of the arrival of the first identified case of a person carrying the virus arriving in the US from Wuhan.
15 January
A second death occurred in a 69-year-old man in China on 15 January.[74][75]
The first known travel-related case of 2019 novel coronavirus entered the United States: “The patient from Washington with confirmed 2019-nCoV infection returned to the United States from Wuhan on January 15, 2020. The patient sought care at a medical facility in the state of Washington, where the patient was treated for the illness. Based on the patient’s travel history and symptoms, healthcare professionals suspected this new coronavirus. A clinical specimen was collected and sent to CDC overnight, where laboratory testing yesterday confirmed the diagnosis via CDC’s Real-time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) test.”[76]
US Embassy in China issued a Health Alert Watch Level 1 for an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, preliminarily identified to be caused by a novel coronavirus.[77]
Its hard to pick a global starting point, but for the US at least, on 14 Jan 2020 they had Zero known cases and a day later had one. I feel so sorry for the misery you have all endured for the past year, especially knowing how preventable so much of this was.
Today the Austrian government announced an extension and tightening of the existing lockdown:
The lockdown is extended from 25 January to 7 February. Nonessential shops and services are to remain closed, and schools remain on distance learning.
Until now, face coverings were mandatory in public when indoors and on public transport, but exactly how you chose to cover your face was up to you. As of 25 January, everyone must use an FFP2 mask.
Until now, it was required to maintain a distance of one metre from others in public wherever practical. That limit has now been increased to two metres.
As of today, 1.14% of the population has been vaccinated; so far I think it’s been only health care workers and care home workers/residents. But today they’ve also opened online and telephone registration for vaccination to the general public. They take your contact details and ask a few questions to determine what priority group you’re in; then someone is supposed to get back to you with a date and location for your vaccination appointment. You can additionally offer to go on the cancellation list, which means that they’ll call you in for a vaccination earlier than your scheduled appointment if a slot becomes available, but you have to commit to being able to attend within two hours. So far 220,000 people in Vienna and Lower Austria have signed up; registration opens for the other federal states tomorrow.
I can’t be bothered to wade through that entire PNAS paper, but it’s very unclear to me what exactly this could mean. Life expectancy for who, exactly? The abstract and a table halfway through say they are talking about life expectancy at birth. I don’t see how they could possibly make any reliable inference about the effect of COVID on life expectancy for someone born today, but surely there’s a good chance that it’s negligible once we have vaccines and herd immunity.
Any time the life expectancy rate goes down, it’s notable because the life expectancy should be rising based on advances in medicine, diet and improved conditions, etc.
So a bunch of people died earlier than they normally would have this year, which we all already know, so that lowered life expectancy calculations? I’m missing why this is interesting.
Thanks, I used to know this stuff, but very rusty. So they are presumably talking about this:
We know a lot more people are dying than usual, most of them elderly, through a highly unusual temporary phenomenon. Long term effects are possible but largely unknown. I honestly don’t see how it adds insight to describe a pandemic as a temporary change in life expectancy at the population level. It just seems to dilute the data about who exactly this might kill into something less precise.
You seem to want to use the life expectancy metric for something it isn’t.
Perhaps this?
Life expectancy is often used to measure how the population is doing,
For instance, life expectancy is used in policy decisions like this (from the wiki)
As an example, last year African Americans have a shorter life expectancy than whites because of Covid. That’s a measure of how the African American community was affected more by Covid.
It’s a useful way to summarize the combined impact of the pandemic on population mortality. It quantifies how significant the pandemic is. As an actuary, I find that number very interesting.
After 35 years of sharing everything from a love for jazz music to tubes of lip gloss, twins Kimberly and Kelly Standard assumed that when they became sick with Covid-19 their experiences would be as identical as their DNA.
The virus had different plans.
Early last spring, the sisters from Rochester, Michigan, checked themselves into the hospital with fevers and shortness of breath. While Kelly was discharged after less than a week, her sister ended up in intensive care.
Kimberly spent almost a month in critical condition, breathing through tubes and dipping in and out of shock. Weeks after Kelly had returned to their shared home, Kimberly was still relearning how to speak, walk and chew and swallow solid food she could barely taste.
Nearly a year later, the sisters are bedeviled by the bizarrely divergent paths their illnesses took.
“I want to know,” Kelly said, “why did she have Covid worse than me?”
Since the new coronavirus first shuddered into view, questions like the one posed by Ms. Standard have spurred scientific projects around the globe. Among the 94 million infections documented since the start of the outbreak, no two have truly been alike, even for people who share a genetic code.
…
My bold.
Dang. I hope research yields information on this. There’s still so much about COVID that we don’t understand.
More somewhat belated Austrian news: on Saturday, 16 January the capital saw what was almost certainly its largest anti-lockdown demo so far, with around 10,000 in attendance.
I normally witness big public demos myself since I work downtown near the streets that most big protests and marches tend to happen on. But given that this latest demo happened on a weekend, I was nowhere near the area. Before this demo, the biggest anti-lockdown one I’d seen had at most three hundred people.
According to local news media, the demo was dominated by conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists. The country’s major far-right party, the FPÖ, was out in full force, having by now adopted a firmly anti-vaxxer-friendly platform. (They run scaremongering newspaper ads that the vaccine is risky but that the government is going to force it on everyone.)
The demo remained peaceful, though a few hundred participants were fined for violating the lockdown rules on social distancing, and three or four more were arrested (though I gather this number includes some counter-protestors who were arrested for blocking the main march). Curiously, the anti-maskers and lockdown protestors seem to be pretty compliant when not demonstrating; I haven’t seen anyone openly flouting the rules on face coverings in shops and on public transit. (By comparison, I’m seeing several apparently new videos each day showing anti-maskers causing scenes and even getting themselves arrested in American shops.)
Today The Guardian is reporting that Germany is considering following Austria’s lead in making FFP2 masks mandatory. The article includes a nice diagram and explanation of how FFP2 masks differ from the run-of-the-mill variety.
