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

icerat said:
<snip>

ETA: Note that several (many?) places have started to incorporate the pandemic years into their Excess Mortality baselines, using the common formulation of average of the previous 5 years, so a higher absolute death rate is now "the new normal" and "excess" per se disappears.
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One thing to look at is life expectancy and how it changes over time.
 
icerat said:
ETA: Note that several (many?) places have started to incorporate the pandemic years into their Excess Mortality baselines, using the common formulation of average of the previous 5 years, so a higher absolute death rate is now "the new normal" and "excess" per se disappears.
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Neither the CDC nor the Society of Actuaries include pandemic years in their baselines, leaving the question of why the OECD estimates are so much higher.
 
jt512 said:
Neither the CDC nor the Society of Actuaries include pandemic years in their baselines, leaving the question of why the OECD estimates are so much higher.
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I haven't looked, but differences in EM are usually due to differences in how baseline is calculated, and/or, if age-adjusted, differences in the reference population.

EM is a really course measure that's become a "gold standard" for, imo, primarily ideological reasons. It's a great metric for decision-based evidence making.
 
icerat said:
EM is a really course measure that's become a "gold standard" for, imo, primarily ideological reasons. It's a great metric for decision-based evidence making.
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;) I see what you did there. That's how politics works. First make decisions, then look for reasons to justify those decisions.
 
Latest San Diego County report shows Covid, Flu, and RSV cases continue to decline. Deaths declining though with a multi week lag from the peak. For deaths from 12/10/23 to 2/9/24, Flu looks to be coming in slightly lower than an average Flu year. Covid-19 looks to come in at a bad Flu year (like 2017/18) with about 5x more deaths than a normal Flu year.

https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/hhsa/programs/phs/community_epidemiology/

Winter peak in all three. Stronger peak in Flu and RSV. For the two months from 12/9/23 to 2/10/24 there have been no deaths from Flu, RSV, or Covid-19 for ages from 0-17.

Both Covid and Flu deaths were concentrated in the elderly.

In the last two months, for those over 65, there were a total of 99 Covid deaths, and 38 Flu deaths.

However, while much less frequent, deaths for Flu exceeded those for Covid-19 for those under 50 y/o. Covid claimed 4 lives while Flu claimed 6 lives.
 
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marting said:
Latest San Diego County report shows Covid, Flu, and RSV cases continue to decline. Deaths declining though with a multi week lag from the peak. For deaths from 12/10/23 to 2/9/24, Flu looks to be coming in slightly lower than an average Flu year. Covid-19 looks to come in at a bad Flu year (like 2017/18) with about 5x more deaths than a normal Flu year.
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We've had an odd round of 'flu here, right in the middle of a very hot summer. One rest home came up with 6 new vacancies as a result.

marting said:
In the last two months, for those over 65, there were a total of 99 Covid deaths, and 38 Flu deaths.

However, while much less frequent, deaths for Flu exceeded those for Covid-19 for those under 50 y/o. Covid claimed 4 lives while Flu claimed 6 lives.
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I'm definitely going back to my original name of "Boomer Hoover" for covid.

I notice our local panic artist hasn't posted in some time - see if we can draw him out by focusing on the lack of deaths caused by covid. I'm sure there have been some, but in the covid wave that's now receding over here, I haven't seen a single death outside of care homes from covid this summer.
 
The Atheist said:
I'm definitely going back to my original name of "Boomer Hoover" for covid.

I notice our local panic artist hasn't posted in some time - see if we can draw him out by focusing on the lack of deaths caused by covid. I'm sure there have been some, but in the covid wave that's now receding over here, I haven't seen a single death outside of care homes from covid this summer.
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:)

Along those lines there have been zero Covid deaths for kids <18 Y/O over the current and prior fiscal year. These run from July 1 to June 30 so it's been at least a year and a half since anyone under 18 died of Covid here. And we have a lot of obese kids these days.

And yes, Covid clearly has been skewing even more towards killing the elderly. An exception occurred back in Aug/Sept of 2021 during the Delta wave. Delta was doing in many more middle-aged people than prior variants. But since Omicron there was a big shift back toward the elderly.
 
Sigh.

I've now met a covid kook Doctor.

Amongst the garbage he spewed at me:

"Lab leak not non-existent wet market."

"Vaccines don't work."

"Omicron was genetically engineered because in every set of GCAT only one letter was changed."

"The people that invented Omicron should get the Nobel prize."

From the above, I'd assume that he doesn't even understand that Covid is an RNA virus, hence GCAU rather than GCAT.

Sigh.

I'm wondering if I need to report him, seemed very unprofessional to me.

(Not to mention crazy.)

Makes me wonder if he caught Covid and this is the brain-addling result.
 
marting said:
Along those lines there have been zero Covid deaths for kids <18 Y/O over the current and prior fiscal year. These run from July 1 to June 30 so it's been at least a year and a half since anyone under 18 died of Covid here. And we have a lot of obese kids these days.
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Hell yes, same here. That's very good news.

marting said:
And yes, Covid clearly has been skewing even more towards killing the elderly. An exception occurred back in Aug/Sept of 2021 during the Delta wave. Delta was doing in many more middle-aged people than prior variants. But since Omicron there was a big shift back toward the elderly.
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I'm finding it very hard to get upset about that, even though I'm not far off joining that set.
 
Seeing some news reports about a new study that will undoubtedly be a new talking point for the anti-vax crowd.

Different news outlets' choice of headlines is revealing:

Largest Covid Vaccine Study Yet Finds Links to Health Conditions (MSN)

Largest-ever COVID vaccine study links shot to small increase in heart and brain conditions (Yahoo News)

Better:
Covid Vaccines Linked To Small Increase In Heart And Brain Disorders, Study Finds—But Risk From Infection Is Far Higher (Forbes)

The Forbes article also has a lot more numbers than the other two, which makes it easier to make sense of the findings, e.g.:
Meanwhile, the chances of having a neurological event after a Covid infection were up to 617-fold higher than following COVID vaccination, which suggests “the benefits of vaccination substantially outweigh the risks,” according to the Vaccine study researchers.
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I still have some questions though. Because you can still have a Covid infection after being vaccinated, so does the "617-fold" higher risk include both post-vaccine Covid infections and naive Covid infections?
 
marting said:
Along those lines there have been zero Covid deaths for kids <18 Y/O over the current and prior fiscal year. These run from July 1 to June 30 so it's been at least a year and a half since anyone under 18 died of Covid here. And we have a lot of obese kids these days.
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Mortality in kids has always been very low, but is anyone getting tested for Covid these days?
 
According to my son, he worked an extra shift at his job a couple days ago because someone had Covid. So that must mean that somebody is still testing for Covid.

Of course, I did wonder if someone just wanted a day off and it was a convenient excuse. Could be that too.
 
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icerat said:
Mortality in kids has always been very low, but is anyone getting tested for Covid these days?
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My g/f and I each got sick within the last two weeks. We both tested ourselves for Covid. Both negative. We had colds.

Given that you can tale Paxlovid if you have Covid, it makes sense to test.
 
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It's been quite a while since I ran across a peer reviewed paper that made me question whether any of the peer reviewers or authors ever got out of high school. But there is this just published a few weeks ago.

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign
https://www.cureus.com/articles/203...nal-trials-and-global-vaccination-campaign#!/

There's so much that's bogus in this paper it's hard to pick a standout but straight innumeracy is unforgivable of people claiming to know what they are doing.

It goes on a rant about absolute risk reduction v relative risk reduction then applies NNV (number needed to vaccinate) using absolute risk reduction over a few months exposure window.

For example, assuming an NNV of 119 and an IFR of 0.23% (both conservative estimates), approximately 52,000 vaccinations would be needed to prevent one COVID-19-related death. Thus, for the BNT162b2 injection, a generous estimate would be two lives saved from COVID-19 for every 100,000 courses of the biological.
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That would be a total lives saved of just under 7k in the USA assuming everyone or 330M was vaccinated. So who were these ignorant authors? Oh.

M. Nathaniel Mead • Stephanie Seneff • Russ Wolfinger • Jessica Rose • Kris Denhaerynck • Steve Kirsch • Peter A. McCullough

But better late than never:

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02...e-harms-of-covid-19-vaccines-to-be-retracted/

A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.
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Nice work mate.

I'm sure someone suggested ME/CFS and long covid were mental illnesses, and it looks like that might be at least partly true.
 
Eric Topol has published an update on multiple recent long covid research papers as well as a ME/CFS multi-year study just out of the NIH.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/towards-solving-the-long-covid-puzzle

Interferon-Gamma As a Possible Biomarker for Diagnosis and Treatment
A new report assayed interferon-gamma, part of the first line of defense of innate immunity to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Individuals with Long Covid had persistent elevation after the acute phase, and during follow-up serial assessment of this biomarker showed resolution among the participants with symptom resolution.
...
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) Deep Phenotyping
The 8-year, long awaited NIH project results were published in a 70-page manuscript. Like the BBB study above, the number of participants studies were small, but compensated by extensive characterization and suitable matched controls.
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The Atheist said:
Nice work mate.

I'm sure someone suggested ME/CFS and long covid were mental illnesses, and it looks like that might be at least partly true.
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What does that have to do with what marting posted? I'm not seeing a connection, unless you are equating neurological with mental illness.
 
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