I was meaning reporting as in giving the public reports on what is going on, estimated case numbers etc. Generally, you have to look for this info.
As you have probably noticed, the MAGA candidate won and put the third option, the antivaxxer, in charge of MAHA, and the MAHA guy has already been humiliated in public by the orange fatty for criticizing his diet.
Nate Bear presents a graph of Influenza vs. COVID deaths per month where either contributes to death; also COVID wastewater measures. Apr 2022-Sep 2024 as of 10/19/2024.
Can you show us the numbers to back up your claim, marting?
Let me count (some of) the ways:
Based on Trump transition closes in on picks for top health posts (Politico, Nov 19, 2024)
See below
I've made lots of observations. Are you thinking about the observation in San Diego County that Covid-19 was hitting the elderly much harder but younger cohorts were impacted similarly. A change from the earlier 2 years where all age groups were getting hit hard by Covid-19?
Of course. It's been pretty obvious since the early days of the pandemic that the NPIs people were using had a much greater effect on reducing flu levels than Covid-19. Flu has lower R0s. Pretty sure I made that point a long time ago.
gis.cdc.gov
The point marting needs to realize is that NPIs not only had a much greater effect on reducing flu levels than Covid-19. It still has!
The 5k was an estimate based on looking at flu season waves and CDC flu mortality estimates. The CDC does not have anywhere near accurate data on deaths initiated by flu since by the time people are hospitalized it has often evolved into pneumonia. What the CDC does have is estimates for influenza caused mortality going back decades. This includes point value estimates with 95% confidence intervals. Death certificate data on flu is close to meaningless. The CDC does publish flu hospitalization data from which we can look at the week by week hospitalizations. The peak can be located by finding the week with the largest hospitalization change. Deaths can then be reasonably inferred by that fraction compared to the total in that season.
For instance, take the 2010-11 flu season. The point estimate for flu is 36,000 deaths. Roughly the median estimate in the decade before Covid-19. However, the 95% confidence ranged from 21,000 to 140,000. A sad state of affairs about our ability understand flu's impact.
Looking at the hospitalizations of those 65+, we see the peak week hospitalization was 13% of the 2010-11 flu season. Since the point estimate was 36,000, and assuming deaths roughly tracked hospitalizations, that yields just over 4700 deaths per week at the peak for the point estimate. For the lower CI estimate it would be 2700/week and for the higher CI estimate it would be 10200/week.
Refs:
Laboratory-Confirmed Influenza Hospitalizations
Yeah. Covid-19 has dropped and plateaued at pretty low levels. Seems XEC isn't really growing as much as prior leading variants. R0 looks like only a bit over 1 while the other variants are all well under 1. Just doesn't seem to be growing as rapidly as the other large wave producing ones. Wouldn't surprise me if the Winter wave, which has been the dominant one since 2020, comes out less than the Summer wave. Flu appears to just be ramping strongly. More than doubled in the last 2 weeks from its typical low off season. Time to get the Flu shot. Given the short number of months both the Flu and Covid shots provide protection, I'm going to wait until I see a similar ramp start on Covid-19.
Can't really make any assumptions except that obviously many people are not reporting. However wastewater doesn't lie, and it's staying relatively constant which suggests the actual case numbers are too. Only problem for me is that the concentration in Hawkes bay is much higher than the rest of the country.
Don't read too much into those percentages. It's a daily snapshot with very low numbers. There are only 3 people 80-89 and 8 in the 10-19 age groups.
I'm not so sure about wastewater telling the truth. I don't think it can tell us if a rise is due to more people being infected or each case producing more virus. It also can't tell us about new infections versus reinfections.
Doesn't really matter. Reinfections are just proof that new variants are getting past prior immunity, which is no surprise. Being weighted towards people who produce more virus is good, because it's a better indication of virulence. The people who are getting really ill from it are what matters most.
I don't think it's good that we no longer know approximately how many people are infected and thus contageous. It's no doubt important that some people get really ill (and some still die) from this, but the number of asymptomatic people isn't unimportant. They are the Typhoid Marys of SARS-CoV-2 and the ones that it is most difficult to take precautions against for the most vulnerable of us.
And mentioned in my tweet on Sunday, the number of cases (based on wastewater), hospitalizations and deaths has been decreasing in Denmark recently even though winter has begun, but you say that they appear to be increasing in New Zealand even though summer has just started.
Are you sure? This is a screenshot from there
Top right graph. Arrows at the bottom of it to choose different data. There's a bar at the top of the graph (light grey so not very obvious) that allows you to change the time period the graph covers.
Not too bad, nasty temperature and symptoms of a bad cold, but bad enough that I did suspect it and doddecide to take an LFT.
Yes, it's like the bar at the bottom of the screen of the graphs at Our World of Data (OWD), except that, unlike with the OWD bar, I may have noticed that the grey bar was there, but I never realized that it served a purpose.
It's not just when symptoms are mild. It's also when symptoms are different from what people expect.
But hang on, that was last year! And here we are again...
Have they gone into any statistics about infection? Because there isn't here. Hospital admissions aren't even routinely tested; I was visiting a hospital a lot before I got COVID, and I don't think that is a coincidence.
The cough that dare not say its name (at least not in headlines ...)
It is no wonder that people get the impression that the flu is the major problem. We have those people in this thread, too, even though they ought to know better.
And a bit further down the page, it becomes apparent that COVID-19 is actually the major problem. But for some reason, we have to read about the flu again before we get to COVID-19:
And why not tell us about the number of those children who are hospitalized with C19? Because that is another one of those desired pandemic delusions: that children are immune to C19, that they don't die, aren't hospitalized and don't get Long Covid.
Cat in the Hat on X comments on the BBC article Flu cases make NHS busier than ever with 95% of beds full :
I assume that all the cases mentioned in the article, maybe except for the one in 2019, have already become part of the antivaxxer Died Suddenly mythology.
It's disappointing that Sedars Sinai wrote "during the pandemic," but they made up for it by writing, "during the presumed less-severe Omicron phase of the pandemic."
More of those nosocomial infections. Still in the UK, but it seems to be much the same in other places with insufficient ventilation and masking in hospitals:
SARS-CoV-2: Nosocomial 181; Community 70
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
The thread has 277.2k views so far, but it deserved many more.
