Keep the good new coming!
I’m not sure I follow this logic. Or maybe I’m tripping over the terminology.
At least here in the USA there is negligible quarantine and control. Folks do what they please, mask or not as they choose, etc. Morons. Even if they test positive, they go out in public or not as they will. With or without a mask as their party affiliation dictates.
In that environment, the only thing limiting transmission is that overtly sick people mostly stay home in bed. Anyone infected but asymptomatic is likely going about their normal public business blithely, and perhaps completely unwittingly.
So in that scenario, the majority of infection comes from exposure to asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic carriers. Because those are the only carriers out in public to be spreading.
Normally I agree wholeheartedly with your COVID posts. What have I failed to understand here?
119,120,511 total cases
2,641,790 dead
94,731,229 recovered
In the US:
29,925,902 total cases
543,721 dead
20,797,298 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
The US will have more than 30,000,000 total cases tomorrow.
This seems rather lighthearted after your post Bo but I have been noticing that several of our cats’ legs seem to be getting shorter.
'Pets are often celebrated for matching their owner’s mannerisms.
Walking at the same pace? A sign of good training. Cuddling and watching TV together? Adorable.
Stress-eating together because you’re both home all day due to a harrowing pandemic? Less endearing – and potentially dangerous.
Veterinarians across the US are noticing weight gain and higher levels of obesity in pets since the pandemic began, said Dr. Ernie Ward, veterinary food therapist and founder of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention."
119,627,569 total cases
2,651,985 dead
96,270,132 recovered
In the US:
29,993,423 total cases
545,544 dead
22,031,220 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Ah, well: just shy of 30,000,000 today. We’ll hit it tomorrow for sure.
The US has the most cases in the world; Brazil & India are neck-and-neck for 2nd with 11,300,000+ and counting each.
Those people are pre-symptomatic. Prevention of asymptomatic transmission is also important, but not nearly as numerically significant as suppression of pre-symptomatic transmission.
The distinction is important, so it hadn’t occurred to me that other people might be using the words in a different way than I do.
Seriously??
One of the gifts I’ve acquired from posting here is the awareness certainty that no matter how clear I think I’m being someone will take it the wrong way and either dismiss me outright or be offended. It’s best to explain and clarify before hitting “reply.” Then reread your post for all the ways it might be misunderstood. And then explain and clarify some more. You know: like in real life. Carry on.
Missouri:
120,074,370 total cases
2,660,131 dead
96,597,473 recovered
In the US:
30,043,662 total cases
546,605 dead
22,108,596 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Worldometers has the US at 90,000 case per million (and yes we know that is probably a gross under-estimate).
I wonder whether the vaccine rollout will stop it reaching 100K, or 1 in 10 of the population?
Thank you. Makes sense now.
A bright note… 
Video available on the Berkshire Community College Facebook page. I don’t know if you have to have a FB acct to see this.
Or try this link.
Ma has always been supremely cool and a class act.
Bars reopened on Oahu a few days ago. While I’m fully vaccinated, I think I’ll wait until the wife is too before I partake.
120,417,285 total cases
2,665,249 dead
96,972,282 recovered
In the US:
30,081,657 total cases
547,234 dead
22,169,237 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
A couple of pre-release articles came out today. Here is an news article summarizing them.
The articles can be found at
and
These have not yet been peer reviewed, and I do not have the molecular or epidemiological expertise to judge them myself. They are being released by well respected researchers, so I would be surprised if there are serious problems.
Here is my take away from them. Some of these things I find quiet surprising.
- Viral load distributions are the same for the symptomatic and asymptomatic groups.
- Viral load is related to contagion.
- The vast majority of active virions in the community are reservoired in a very small fraction of infected people. They claim 90% of the virions in the community are in 2% of the patients, and 99% are in 12% of the infected individuals.
If these results hold up, it does go a long way to explaining superspread events. As they say, and one whole paper goes into, being near (or living with) an infected individual in most cases isn’t going to lead to infection. Except, in the rare cases where the infected individual is one of the unlucky people with a high viral load, then the chance of contagion goes way up.
This brings up a side question, do we know if other diseases work like this, like rhino or RSV related colds? Or, are we discovering it about SARS-Cov-2 because the technology to get virus counts is relatively cheap, and there is funding and motivation to do this kind of research?
I’m really looking forward to future work which gets into why some people are symptomatic, and others not, and why some people have very high viral loads, and others don’t.
I’m going to go out on a limb and bet a million internet dollars that much of what we’re learning about covid is undiscovered stuff true of many diseases. The lingering effects, non-homogeneous spread, and asymptomatic cases are all things we’ve known about but this year of disease study will turn a lot of the common wisdom on its head.
I’m surprised that deaths are still as high as they are. At this point I would have expected that vast majority of high-risk people are vaccinated (e.g. in Mass we’ve opened vaccinations to lower-risk groups). I thought at this point of the roll-out we’d see maybe 10% of peak deaths.
Deaths lag infection by ~3 weeks (???). At this point you’re seeing how many people were vaccinated 3 weeks ago.
(With a sharply declining infection rate, daily deaths lag infection by even more, because the death rate is swamped by the small tail of the large peak, and there are no short-term deaths to pull down the average)
Israeli case counts kept rising well into their much more efficient vaccine rollout. At least 4 weeks in before case numbers were being obviously affected, iirc.