Cont: The One Covid-19 Science and Medicine Thread Part 5

[marting]

Flu has been dominating the last 2 months here in San Diego. It's been the worst flu season in many years and has been killing 3 to 4 times more people than Covid-19. However, Covid-19 tends to be year round with peaks in the summer and winter. Flu tends to peak and go away. There are signs the flu levels are decreasing after a double peak here in San Diego.

From 12/29/2024 to 2/22/2025 Here's the stats:

Flu Deaths:
For those under 65, 38 deaths.
For those >= 65, 98 deaths.

Covid-19:
For those under 65, 9 deaths.
For those >= 65, 31 deaths.

Covid-19 has killed more people since last July but most were over 65 and occurred during the summer C19 wave. The winter wave is substantially lower this year.

Here's the weekly link. I've been saving the pdfs each week since there doesn't seem to be a historical archive.

https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hhsa/programs/phs/Epidemiology/SDC_Respiratory_Virus_Surveillance_Report.pdf

 

[dann]

San Diego County Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report, June 30, 2024, to March 1, 2025 (SanDiegoCounty.gov, Mar 6, 2025)
COVID-19: Cases 24,320; Deaths 234
Influenza: Cases 35,086; Deaths 174
RSV: Cases 4,690; Deaths 6

Covid-19 has killed more people since last July but most were over 65 and occurred during the summer C19 wave. The winter wave is substantially lower this year.

Looking at Marting's numbers, I notice that influenza has killed fewer people than Covid-19 since December, and that most of the people killed by the flu are over 65.
I don't know why Marting doesn't seem to find it worth mentioning that the majority of people killed by the flu are older than 65, but I have a suspicion.

 

[novaphile]

Hmm...

Sadly, I've just discovered that one of the locals near me is an anti-vaxxer.

I told him to stop speaking, when he said: "I have done my own research".

Anyone who says that, without having spent at least 10 years working as a post doc in vaccine research, doesn't get to use those words.

Listening to professional ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ artists on faceplant and yousuck does not qualify as research.

 

[dann]

A friend of mine was recently hospitalized with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS).
It occurred to me that I had seen something about a connection with COVID-19 a year or so ago, so I looked it up:

Risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome 6 times higher after COVID infection, study suggests (CIDRAP, Oct 18, 2023)
A new study from Israel ties COVID-19 infection to an increased risk of a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) within 6 weeks, while mRNA vaccination was linked to a decreased risk of the rare but serious autoimmune disease.
(...)
The odds ratios (ORs) for COVID-linked GBS and COVID-19 vaccine administration were 6.30 and 0.41, respectively, according to multivariable conditional logistic regression models. The findings were comparable when COVID-19 infection or vaccine administration occurred in the previous 1 and 2 months, although the vaccination results at 4 weeks weren't statistically significant.

For some reason, the Danish links I found were all about GBS as a side effect of the COVID-19 vaccinations. This wasn't mentioned:

"While Guillain-Barre is extremely rare, people should be aware that having a COVID infection can increase their risk of developing the disorder, and receiving an mRNA vaccine can decrease their risk," co-senior author Anat Arbel, MD, said in an American Academy of Neurology news release.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is believed to have had GBS rather than polio.

 

[dann]

Listening to professional ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ artists on faceplant and yousuck does not qualify as research.

A professional ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ artist is now United States Secretary of Health and Human Services.
And the current Director of the National Institutes of Health may be educated, but he isn't any better than RFK Jr:
Jay Bhattacharya: COVID-19 pandemic (Wikipedia)

 

[marting]

San Diego County Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report, June 30, 2024, to March 1, 2025 (SanDiegoCounty.gov, Mar 6, 2025)
COVID-19: Cases 24,320; Deaths 234
Influenza: Cases 35,086; Deaths 174
RSV: Cases 4,690; Deaths 6

Looking at Marting's numbers, I notice that influenza has killed fewer people than Covid-19 since December, and that most of the people killed by the flu are over 65.
I don't know why Marting doesn't seem to find it worth mentioning that the majority of people killed by the flu are older than 65, but I have a suspicion.

You noticed wrong.

Here's the numbers from the Jan. 2 report:
COVID-19 Deaths 188
Influenza: Deaths 14

Covid-19 deaths in the last 2 months: 46 (234-188)
Influenza deaths in the last 2 months: 160 (174-14)

Your statement, "I notice that influenza has killed fewer people than Covid-19 since December," is not close to true. Rather the opposite for all age groups.

Obviously the majority of people that die from Flu or C19 are older. That's always been the case. However, Flu mortality is higher for those under 65. In the last 2 months:

For those under 65 in the last 2 months there have been 5x more deaths from Flu than C19.

COVID-19 Deaths 9 (31-22)
Influenza Deaths 43 (46-3)

 

[marting]

The last two months have seen Influenza deaths greatly exceed Covid-19 deaths for young/middle age people in San Diego.

For those under 50,

Covid-19 deaths: 3
Influenza deaths: 21

For those under 18,

Covid-19 deaths: 0
Influenza deaths: 5

Back in Delta days, Covid-19 also had high mortality among younger people. That shifted with Omicron which skewed more heavily toward the elderly.

 

[novaphile]

I wonder how many of those influenza deaths could have been prevented with vaccination?

 

[marting]

I wonder how many of those influenza deaths could have been prevented with vaccination?

Interesting question. Both up to date Covid-19 vaxes and Flu vaxes aren't high but Flu vaxes have run about 2x more than Covid-19 vaxes. Around 20% Flu and 10% Covid for the middle aged. Elderly more likely to get vaxxed but Covid-19 still at about half the levels of Flu vaxxes.

There are graphs in the San Diego links that show vax rates by age.

 

[dann]

You noticed wrong.
Here's the numbers from the Jan. 2 report:
COVID-19 Deaths 188
Influenza: Deaths 14
Covid-19 deaths in the last 2 months: 46 (234-188)
Influenza deaths in the last 2 months: 160 (174-14)
Your statement, "I notice that influenza has killed fewer people than Covid-19 since December," is not close to true. Rather the opposite for all age groups.

You are right! It should have been: "I notice that influenza has killed fewer people than Covid-19 since December--> June 30, 2024," which was what my (= San Diego County's) numbers were about.

Obviously the majority of people that die from Flu or C19 are older. That's always been the case. However, Flu mortality is higher for those under 65. In the last 2 months:
For those under 65 in the last 2 months there have been 5x more deaths from Flu than C19.
COVID-19 Deaths 9 (31-22)
Influenza Deaths 43 (46-3)

And yes, the majority of people dying from both the flu and C19 are older, but for some reason you only pointed that out in the case of C19.
So to recapitulate:

San Diego County Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report, June 30, 2024, to March 1, 2025 (SanDiegoCounty.gov, Mar 6, 2025)
COVID-19: Cases 24,320; Deaths 234
Influenza: Cases 35,086; Deaths 174
RSV: Cases 4,690; Deaths 6

1) So far, C19 has killed more people than the flu during the current flu season, i.e. since June 2024.
2) C19 and influenza both kill more old people than young.
And when we look at the number of cases and deaths caused by the two infectious diseases, it becomes clear that the case-fatality rate of C19 is much higher than the CFR of influenza.

It would be interesting to know to what extent the current number of flu deaths is due to the weakening of the immune system caused by C19 infections, but I am not sure that we will ever know:

D

Post in thread 'How do we know a pandemic's over?'

Mar 1, 2025

A pretty impressive collection of infectious diseases:

Tern on X, Mar 1, 2025
It's just a covincidence that all these pathogens have had astonishing spikes of infection after everyone got infected with a virus that makes you vulnerable to other infections.

• dann

 

[dann]

Dr. Lucky Tran on X, Mar 10, 2025:
Since the start of COVID, the number of people reporting a disability soared. Yet the majority of the world acts like COVID is over, and Long COVID doesn't exist.

Source of graphics: 30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything in March 2020, NYT, Mar 9, 2025.

I don't know why they're using the past tense.

 

[dann]

Kids:

Kids keep getting sicker as evidence for COVID immune damage builds (The Gauntlet, Mar 8, 2025
Years ago, in the winter of 2021-2022, parents began repeating an anti-vaxxer claim. “Infections,” they began to say, “build the immune system.”
(...)
“We’re experiencing an uptick in pneumonia,” went the common parlance. But “uptick” isn’t really the right word to describe it. Central Nova Scotia, for example, reported 753 cases of pneumonia as of October 2024, versus 260 at the same time the previous year. As toddlers were hit hard by the disease, officials scratched their heads. Reporting in Medical Press quoted the CDC as stating, “The increase in children ages 2–4 years is notable because M. pneumoniae historically hasn't been recognized as a leading cause of pneumonia in this age group.”
Through it all, governments and media grasped for any explanation that did not feature the collapse of public health and introduction of a novel virus that harms immune systems.

Children ages 2-4 years! Yeah, it's just gotta be lockdowns and immunity debt, right?!

 

[dann]

Unlike the graph from yesterday of U.S. adults reporting a disability, this one from Cat (Solidarit1) on X, Mar 9, 2025, is of ...



It would have been interesting to see the years prior to Mar 2020.

 

[dann]

Continued...

Cat in the Hat on X, Mar 11, 2025:
Let’s compare that to similar data from the UK showing how many people have dropped out of the workplace due to long-term illness.
Two different countries but a very similar trend which mysteriously started shortly after people started getting repeatedly infected with Covid…

So what is the solution to a calamity like this? To cut disability benefits!
Chancellor urged not to make disability benefit cuts that could plunge 700,000 households into poverty (Independent/MSN.com, Mar 11, 2025)

 

[dann]

In post 654 three months ago, I posted links to the issue of COVID-19's impact on cognitive skills.
A video from yesterday about declining cognitive skills doesn't mention C19 and brain fog at all!

Cognitive Report Reveals DISASTROUS Sharp Decline Of This In People (The Damage Report on YouTube, Mar 23, 2025 - 8:07 min.)
New reports from different scientific organizations, such as the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), reveal the devastating sharp decline of this in people, which could prove disastrous for future generations. John Iadarola and Sharon Reed break it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
Read more here:
Human Intelligence Sharply Declining - https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-i...
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...-trends?utm_source=pocket_saves&v=XVJ7VOO88sI
No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.
As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.
These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills."

The video quotes this:

According to 2023 results from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the same international consortium that puts out the PISA survey, 34 percent of adults in the United States scored at the lowest levels of numeracy, which essentially means that they lack the ability to work with numbers. A year prior, that share was just 29 percent.

What could have happened between 2022 and 2023 to cause a decline of this size?

John Iadarola comments:

I'm not saying I'm good with numbers. I'm not. But a number like that jumping up five points in a single year is concerning. Maybe that's the educational disruption. That's where we learn about numbers, really - most people in their day-to-day lives don't do a lot of practice with numbers - but that's not great. And a lot of people think that it's got to be something to do with technology: People are spending more and more times on devices.

The educational disruption?! But didn't almost all lockdowns and restrictions end after 2021?! At least in Denmark, they stopped in the winter of 2021-2022.
A certain decline in brain power had been happening even before the pandemic, which is mentioned in another quotation in the video, which also mentions "educational disruption":

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining (Futurism)
Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.

John Iadarola and his cohost Sharon Reed move on to talking about deteriorating critical-thinking skills, but they don't seem to consider that this phenomenon may be due to something other than the "educational disruption" caused by lockdowns. I mean, how would lockdowns impact numeracy skills and make them deteriorate to this extent in just one year - after lockdowns had stopped?

In the comments section, one person writes:
A large part of it could be the elephant in the room!

 

[dann]

Congratulations to all Americans (and the rest of us, I guess).
Trump-appointed director of the National Institutes of Health, the well-known COVID-19 minimizer and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya, has ended the pandemic and thus research grants to study SARS-CoV-2:

Exclusive: NIH to cut grants for COVID research, documents reveal (Nature, Mar 26, 2025)
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding on research related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic”, according to an internal NIH document that Naturehas obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many COVID-19 grants will be terminated.
The crackdown on COVID-19 research comes as the NIH under US President Donald Trump has halted nearly 400 grants in the past month. An earlier version of the documents, obtained by Nature on 5 March, directed staff to identify and potentially cancel projects on transgender populations; gender identity; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce; and environmental justice.
(...)
In addition to these research topics, the document outlines a new category of research that should be terminated: any project on a list sent by the NIH director or the HHS, which is currently helmed by longtime anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

About Jay Bhattacharya as a COVID-19 minimizer:

Jay Bhattacharya: COVID-19 pandemic (Wikipedia)
In a 2021 case about masks in Tennessee schools, judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee criticized Bhattacharya's testimony as "troubling and problematic", said Bhattacharya had oversimplified conclusions of a study, and said he "offered opinions regarding the pediatric effects of masks on children, a discipline on which he admitted he was not qualified to speak". He was also named a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a new think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that published articles opposing various measures against COVID-19; Kulldorff and Gupta, his co-authors on the Great Barrington Declaration, have also had roles there.

Tag: Jay Bhattacharya (Science-Based Medicine)

On X, the author of the article in Nature writes:

Max Kozlov on X, Mar 26, 2025:
This document includes COVID-19 on a list of “research activities that NIH no longer supports”, in addition to research on China, DEI, “transgender issues” and vaccine hesitancy.
It also says that grants related to South Africa and climate change should be terminated.

 

[rjh01]

In post 654 three months ago, I posted links to the issue of COVID-19's impact on cognitive skills.
A video from yesterday about declining cognitive skills doesn't mention C19 and brain fog at all!


The video quotes this:

What could have happened between 2022 and 2023 to cause a decline of this size?

John Iadarola comments:

The educational disruption?! But didn't almost all lockdowns and restrictions end after 2021?! At least in Denmark, they stopped in the winter of 2021-2022.
A certain decline in brain power had been happening even before the pandemic, which is mentioned in another quotation in the video, which also mentions "educational disruption":


John Iadarola and his cohost Sharon Reed move on to talking about deteriorating critical-thinking skills, but they don't seem to consider that this phenomenon may be due to something other than the "educational disruption" caused by lockdowns. I mean, how would lockdowns impact numeracy skills and make them deteriorate to this extent in just one year - after lockdowns had stopped?

In the comments section, one person writes:
A large part of it could be the elephant in the room!

This increase in the number of people who face cognitive challenge has nothing to do with covid. It is worse than that. It has been going up steadily since 2014 (what happened then?). Ref: https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.ft.com/post/3lkdp5qcwh227. To find this link I followed the links you supplied.

 

[dann]

Universal Coronavirus Vaccine Breakthrough: A Single Shot That Could Protect You From COVID, MERS, and the Common Cold (SciTechDaily, Mar 25, 2025)
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 use sugar molecules to hide from the immune system, but scientists at Scripps Research have designed a universal coronavirus vaccine that strips these sugars and exposes a stable, rarely mutating part of the spike protein.This approach triggered strong immune responses in animal studies and showed promise in neutralizing multiple coronaviruses, including those causing COVID-19, MERS, and even the common cold.

A universal, long-lasting vaccine against Covid would be nice, but it it doesn't way when it might become available - if ever.

 

[Myriad]

A universal, long-lasting vaccine against Covid would be nice, but it it doesn't way when it might become available - if ever.

I'm sure nothing could go wrong with priming our immune systems to react strongly to sugar molecules. How fast can we rush this into production?

 

[dann]

Something can always go wrong with vaccines that are still under development. They haven't even started testing this one on humans yet.
With the early rabies vaccines, one in 200 died from an autoimmune reaction to the vaccine, which was still pretty good odds against a disease with a case fatality rate of 100% and a vaccine that you could wait to get until post infection. They managed to eliminate that particular problem when they stopped using the spinal cords of rabbits to make the rabies vaccine, and we have come a long way since then.

The current C19 vaccines are far from sterilizing, but since they do offer some protection, it is not quite as urgent to rush potential new vaccines into production as it was in 2020.