India’s daily positive test cases appears to have passed the peak. This is good news.
Hence, the media has pivoted to focusing on the daily body count.
Predictable. Because that is what the media did all of 2020. And rarely went back and reported when cases were in free fall. Because the point is to keep you very scared at all times.
I said last week that India appeared to be peaking. In fact, disease models had reached the same conclusion, but the media kept those hidden.
The CDC Director took the 95% vaccine efficacy and translated that into you have a 5% risk of contracting Covid-19 if vaccinated.
Many experts say these numbers have been misinterpreted. Let’s say they had 10,000 people in a trial who were vaccinated and 10,000 people who were not vaccinated.
5 people in the vaccinated arm had detectable Covid-19, and 95 people in the placebo arm had Covid-19. But just 5 or .05% of the 10,000 vaccinated people got Covid-19, not 5%.
In the trials, the measured likelihood came to 0.04%. See here.
As explained here, a vaccinated person has 5% of the risk that an unvaccinated person has.
But the CDC Director said, in Congress, that if vaccinated, you have a 5% risk of contracting symptomatic Covid-19.
An epidemiologist notes the risk, from current data, is about 1 in 70,000. (I would expect that risk to rise a bit, over time, however.)
I am a brain injured idiot with no relevant experience. I make observations and ask absurdly stupid questions.
Update: Apparently being innumerate is a thing? More in the replies.
Now it could just be, as we’ve seen repeatedly, that public health communication is a disaster – and this is just the typical mangled incoherent staements. Or may be its another Neil Ferguson model…
An “expert” tells us that we will have another “big wave” in the Fall of 2021.
With 70+% having natural immunity or being vaccinated, surely by fall, how would this happen? We’d need to have a major mutation, of which no such mutation has occurred yet – and with fewer and fewer cases, there are less opportunities for mutation.
I am a brain injured idiot with no relevant experience and I can figure this out.
Let’s follow up with this in September-November of 2021.
Turns out that advocating dropping patent protection is for public relations messaging:
It won’t speed the manufacture of vaccines. It enraged the developers who delivered lifesaving doses in record time. But President Joe Biden’s decision to support waiving intellectual property rights for coronavirus shots had a broader purpose: to broadcast his administration’s commitment to global leadership.
More than a month of internal debate led up to Biden’s decision this week to endorse international calls to strip patent protections for vaccines.
Source: Biden move to share vaccine designed to spread US influence | KATU
President Biden implies that taking the intellectual property of vaccine manufacturers is to promote himself. Others in his party suggest he should go further and establish price controls on drug products.
This is not going to end well.
EU leaders do not support the U.S. position and call it a “false debate” as eliminating patents will not deliver vaccines faster. In fact, the major restriction is that the U.S. government has banned the export of vaccines manufactured in the U.S., and in some cases, even the components used by companies to manufacture vaccines outside the U.S.
The UK government goes full anti-vax and says vaccinations do not work – what are they thinking?
That means Americans will still need to quarantine on arrival for up to 10 days although there are a few ways to escape that length a quarantine. Americans could leave isolation after day five if they’ve gotten a second negative test result from a COVID-19 test taken two days after arrival. Americans will still need a third test on day eight after their arrival in the U.K. Those tests need to be booked prior to arrival.
This includes Americans who are fully vaccinated.
Source: UK unveils where citizens can go, US doesn’t make the cut
Thus, the official policy of the UK government is that Covid-19 vaccinations do not work.
Face palm.
It is 14 weeks, as of today.
Cases have fallen off a cliff since Osterholm not only made his projection, but spread it widely via television and mass media outlets.
The magenta arrow is where he made his forecast of a tsunami of new cases worse than anything we’d seen. Osterholm is a fool. But worse, the media will continue to solicit scary statements from him, and will never bother to look back at the failed forecasts from the experts.
They used data and assumptions through March 27, then used multiple models to project Covid cases in the U.S. Projections are in color lines and reality is in black with dotted data points.
One model (green) goes to infinity. Yellow peaks in mid-May and then again in early fall. All the others peak in mid-May (in a week). But reality peaked weeks ago.
Reality:
These models are even more absurd.
Look carefully – with high vaccination, low non-pharmaceutical interventions (our silly mitigation measures) – the yellow model, below, goes off in space (upper right – click on chart to see full size).
But with low vaccination, moderate NPIs, lower left – the yellow model projects far fewer cases.
In other words, the yellow model thinks NPIs are more effective than vaccines!
March 29, 2029:
The U.S. is facing “impending doom” as daily Covid-19 cases begin to rebound once again, threatening to send more people to the hospital even as vaccinations accelerate nationwide, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.
Source: CDC chief warns U.S. headed for ‘impending doom’ as Covid cases rise again: ‘Right now I’m scared’
Couple this with the CDC letting the teacher’s union secretly rewrite the CDC’s guidelines for schools, or that the CDC does not know where the “six foot” rule came from, and the CDC and its Director have no credbility.
April 1, 2021:
It’s just a matter of time before the highly contagious UK COVID-19 variant wreaking havoc around the world surges in the US, a leading epidemiologist warned Thursday.
“This B.1.1.7 surge is going to happen. It’s not an issue of if. It’s going to happen,” Michael Osterholm, head of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“And if you follow what’s happened in the past year, the upper Midwest and Northeast lights up first. They have the first set of cases and the southern Sun Belt states light up next,” Osterholm said.
“Even though we’re seeing a few cases in that area, mark my word, in the next six to eight weeks, we’re going to see that area light up, too. We need to get more vaccine out. That’s the key message right now,” he added.
Source: Epidemiologist predicts surge of dangerous COVID variant in US
Osterholm is a scare mongering idiot who no longer has credibility.
It’s likely too late to stop this upcoming surge, warned Michael Osterholm.
Source: Infectious Disease Expert Explains Why Next COVID-19 Wave In U.S. Is Inevitable | HuffPost
Celebrity epidemiologist Osterholm was completely wrong. In late January he was on national television saying the nation was in the “eye of the hurricane” and that over the next 6-14 weeks, the U.S. would see a surge worse than anything we had seen so far.
Here is what happened since January, at +13 weeks into his 14 week forecast. This chart is from a few days ago – the curve has continued going down since then. Osterholm was not a little wrong – he was idiotically wrong.