Not discussed here I don’t think but it is all very welcome news. The more the merrier as it opens up the possibility of combination treatments. (in fact the trial of the new Pfizer drug is in combination with an existing anti-viral, ritonavir) so expect to see more of that in future.
The great thing about these treatments as well is that they are much less likely to be affected by new variants that arise.
Again, I think it worth emphasising that these treatments mean that we are close to a position where taking a treatment at home will make it highly unlikely that anyone needs to go to hospital and almost certainly you won’t die.
This comes in the same week as the pretty incredible news of the success of the HPV jab which is in the same ballpark of efficacy as these antivirals.
The Economist does estimates of excess deaths due to covid, since official counts are likely to be undercounts for various reasons. Although the article is paywalled (you can see their chart, though), the bottom line is that the real covid death count is more like 17 million. I’m not sure how they handle countries like India which, even in non-pandemic times, do not record all deaths. So it’s possible that even that estimate is on the low side.
I think this was an inevitable challenge in court. Should be interesting to see how it plays out in light of declining deaths and 2 new drugs that should gain approval this month.
This was the Fifth Circuit. Isn’t that the same conservative-leaning circuit that upheld all those right-leaning states that tried to sue a bunch of other states over last November’s election?
A non-paywalled article on the same topic can be found in the Guardian by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters They’ve been well across the numbers since the start and are a source of really solid and unbiased interpretations and explanations.
Okay, I may be confusing this case (Texas v. a whole bunch of swing states) with some other case(s) where Texas (AG Paxton in particular) pushed some anti-democratic election dispute or voter suppression or similar.
It’s one of the articles on this page. Not paywalled AFAIK.
Officials at a college in Colchester, Vt., are blaming Halloween parties for a Covid outbreak, which comes as the state of Vermont has reported a record number of coronavirus cases over the past week.
The virus is surging in Vermont as more people gather inside to avoid the cold weather. Experts warn that holiday gatherings could lead to more cases this winter.
New daily cases have increased 51 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Hospitalizations are also trending upward, fueling anxiety about the state’s hospital capacity as winter approaches.
Is this happening elsewhere in the country too? Why Vermont?
Maybe this has something to do with our fellow poster agzem ranting in a nearby thread, about vaxxes not working, citing news articles about Vermont as his data?
It’s easier to identify an event as a super-spreader if case rates are relatively low and the population is relatively small. I would guess the same thing is happening everywhere.
Well, if agzem bothered to do a quick google search, he would have come up with these stats:
That data shows that not-fully-vaccinated Vermonters have been about four times more likely to get sick, four times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die of the virus than fully vaccinated people in recent weeks.
Covid act now shows that risk levels per county are nearly the inverse of vaccination levels.
It is, but it is part of a wider pattern that is pretty much expected. Absent complete lockdowns and complete vaccination coverage this is what the virus is now going to do. Yoyo-ing along in different places at different times but with the peaks getting less peakier and the deaths and hospitalisations smoothing out somewhat due to boosters and anti-virals until it ends up a background rumble.
Even with cases increasing the countries affected are doing the minimum required to avoid hospital overload rather than reaching for drastic measures.
There are quite a few noises now that we may see it mostly subside to a background level by spring. Which would be nice.
Yikes.