Im-Politic: A CCP Virus Lesson Learned and a Mystery Still Unsolved

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Biden, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Donald Trump, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, mortality, National Center for Health Statistics, vaccines, Washington Post, Worldometers.info, Wuhan virus

As the third anniversary of the CCP Virus’ arrival in the United States approaches, new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have upended a widely held belief about the U.S. government’s response, even as other recent statistics have left another conclusion firmly in place.

The upended belief: that President Biden has handled the pandemic much better than former President Trump. Recently released figures from the CDC say it ain’t so – at least when it comes to the virus’ death toll.

According to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics, in 2020, the number of American deaths attributable to the CCP Virus was 350, 831. According to its latest report on the leading causes of mortality in the United States, Covid 19 took 416,893 lives in 2021. That’s an 18.83 percent increase.

In other words, in 2020, when Trump was President and his policies toward the pandemic were widely considered an unmitigated disaster (except for the Operation Warp Speed policy that produced vaccines in record time), the virus killed many fewer Americans than in 2021, when Joe Biden’s administration has gotten much better marks.

But maybe these results are skewed by the fact that the Trump Covid year only lasted eleven months (because the first recorded American CCP Virus death didn’t occur till February 29, 2020, and the Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021)? Nope. Even when you make the needed changes, and peg the start of the Biden administration in February, 2021, you get the same 18.83 percent gap (with monthly deaths under Trump coming in at 31,893 and under Mr. Biden at 37,899).

The big bump up in deaths under Biden are even stranger when you consider that when the pandemic hit the United States, it was a truly novel coronavirus, meaning that it was difficult to figure out what it even was, much less how rapidly it could spread (thanks in part to China’s refusal to share reliable information), let alone how to treat it. So healthcare providers (and public health agencies) literally were flying blind. Moreover, there was absolutely no vaccine. And relatively few had the chance to develop natural immunity.

It’s true that the vaccine rollout took some time to complete (partly because, again, it was a novel challenge), and that once it was widely available, many Americans refused to be jabbed. But according to this source, by July 30, half of the population was fully vaccinated, and by year-end, this level had hit 62 percent.

Biden supporters can point to the fact that. in fall, 2021, the seven-day daily average of CCP Virus-attributable deaths peaked at 2,093 (on September 22). That was 37.47 percent below the peak under Trump (a seven-day average of 3,347 on January 17, 2021). (These figures come from the Washington Post‘s Covid tracker feature.) But again, there was no vaccine available at all in fall, 2021, under Trump. And natural immunity was much more widespread during President Biden’s first year.

Of course, deaths aren’t the only metric needed to evaluate the effectiveness of CCP Virus responses. Hospitalizations are important, too. A flood of severe virus victims can strain the healthcare system to the breaking point, both making each of them harder to treat effectively, and leaving fewer personnel and resources available for dealing with other serious medical problems.

So it’s more than a little interesting to observe that, according to the Post‘s virus tracker, the peak of reported Covid-related hospital admissions under Trump came on January 6, 2021, at 139,752. During President Biden’s first year, it was 101,865 on December 31, 2021. That’s 27.11 percent fewer. But again, the Trump peak came during a vaccine-less period. Moreover, that Trump peak was the peak for that winter’s wave. That Biden peak wouldn’t arrive until January 19, 2022, when reported hospitalizations hit 161,789 – 15.77 percent higher than the worst Trump figure. And these Biden-era hospitalizations reached such levels even though this was the time when the virus’ Omicron variant became dominant in the United States – strain that was the most infectious, yet the least severe, yet.

But the conclusion that’s been left in place is that, whoever the President, the United States’ virus response has been much less effective than that of many other countries in terms of saving lives.

As of today, the Worldometers.info website reports that the CCP Virus has killed just under 6.69 million globally. The death toll in the United States: Just under 1.12 million. So the United States has suffered 16.74 percent of the world’s virus-related deaths even though it represents just 4.25 percent of the world’s population. That’s a discrepancy so big that it can’t possibly be explained to any meaningful extent by national differences in how virus-related deaths are defined.

A new U.S. Congress convenes next month, and supposedly lots of investigations will be launched – especially by the new Republican majority in the House. Let’s hope that a serious probe of the nation’s clearly bipartisan failure to cope adequately with the CCP Virus is at or near the top of the list.  

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Im-Politic: The Public Shows Signs of Getting It on Fighting Pandemics

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CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Great Barrington Declaration, Im-Politic, lockdowns, mandates, masks, Pew Research Center, public health, social distancing, vaccines

It looks like Americans are having second thoughts about how their government has responded to the CCP Virus pandemic, at least according to this new Pew Research Center survey. And that’s great news for those of us who have insisted that, once it became clear (awfully early on) that the pandemic wasn’t a rerun of the Black Death, the widespread lockdowns, mandates, and other indisciminate measures were cures that, on balance, were needlessly worse than the disease.

To be sure, Americans still feel pretty cautious about the pandemic and its effects. Principally, in May, 41 percent of U.S. adults told Pew that they viewed the virus as a “major threat to public health.” That’s down considerably from the spring of 2020, when the share describing the virus this way was in the mid-60s percent. But it’s still more than four in ten.

The public also still gives robust endorsements to many restrictions on behavior and anti-covid measures that have been strongly encouraged or required nationally or in various states at various times during the pandemic era. For example, 55 percent said that vaccination had been “extremely” or “very” “effective in limiting the spread of the coronavirus,” 49 percent agreed with his characterization of “wearing masks around other people indoors,” and 48 percent thought the same of “limiting activities/interactions with other people.” One exception: Only 34 percent put much stock in “staying at least six feet apart from other people indoors.”

But by an impressive 62 percent to 31 percent, respondents said that “the country’s COVID-19 response has given too little priority” to “meeting the educational needs of K-12 students.”. By 48 percent to 40 percent they felt that short shrift had been given to “supporting overall quality of life for the public.” By 46 percent to 40 percent they said not enough attention was paid to “supporting businesses and economic activity.” And by 46 percent to 30 percent they said that anti-virus strategies failed adequately to “respect individuals’ choices.”

Moreover, the public approval of the authorities most supportive of the virus-centric priorities has taken a major hit. In the spring of 2020, 79 percent agreed that “public health officials such as those at the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]” had done “an excellent or good job responding to the coronavirus outbreak.” By this past May, this support had dropped to 52 percent. And since February, 2021 (shortly after his inauguration) the share of U.S. adults stating that President Biden’s response to the CCP Virus has been excellent or good fell from 54 percent to 43 percent. (Such approval for former President Trump’s virus responses sank as well – from 48 percent in March, 2020 to 36 percent in February, 2021. But no samplings about the Trump strategy have been taken since.)

Predictably, partisan splits appeared, and although no trends over time were presented, it was striking how many self-identified Democrats and ”Democratic leaners” expressed disenchantment with some priorities that have been pursued for most of the pandemic era. In particular, 57 percent of them agreed that “the educational needs of K-12 students have been neglected and 45 percent agreed that too little attention has been paid to “overall quality of life for the public.” At the same time, only 34 percent of Democrats and leaners felt that “businesses and other economic activity” should have received more support, and only 28 percent believe “respecting individuals’ choices” has deserved more emphasis. 

To me, the big takeaway is that Americans may finally be realizing that the tradeoffs between public health and other pressing needs were never adequately acknowledged by the nation’s lockdowns- and restrictions-obsessed public health establishment, or by the political leaders who uncritically followed their advice and failed to understand that balances needed to be struck.

Far from a position that’s “anti-science” or dismissive or the virus’s deadly properties and potential, it’s one that’s entirely consistent with that pressed by the legions of eminent epidemiologists, virologists, and other medical specialists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. This manifesto urged viewing the public health dangers posed during the pandemic holistically, avoiding the wide-ranging and grave consequences of shutting down entire national economies and societies, and focusing virus-mitigation measures instead on those most vulnerable to serious disease and death.

Will the U.S. public health establishment display as much of the learning curve that the Pew poll indicates the public has demonstrated? Will the politicians whose policies overwhelmingly reflected their conventional wisdom? Those are questions whose answers had better be “Yes” if America is to cope with the next pandemic better than it handled this one.  

Im-Politic: So Much for the “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”

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Biden administration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politic, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Remember when President Biden was railing last fall that the CCP Virus crisis at that point was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was needlessly stressing the hospital system, and inexcusably exposing to danger those Americans who had done the right thing? How he used this claim to justify his push for vaccine mandates as a condition of employment for much of the U.S. workforce? And how numerous businesses, universities, and numerous state and local governments had already been using the same reasoning to shut the unvaccinated out of workplaces (both as employees and customers) and classrooms?

As I explained back then, this contention was completely unfounded because natural immunity and asymptomatic Covid had created towering, and likely insuperable, difficulties, in knowing the percentage of unvaxxed Americans who had even contracted the virus, much less who had been killed or hospitalized from it.

But just the other day, I discovered that even by the misleading evidence cited by the President and other fearmongers to make their case, this argument has completely fallen apart. The evidence – from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – ignores the above complications, and leaves out jurisdictions containing nearly 40 percent of America’s population.

In addition, its central supposed finding is presented – and has been ceaselessly parroted by much of the national media – without mentioning any of the context that all along would have made clear just how rock-bottom low the chances of being hospitalized or killed by the CCP Virus have been.

Specifically, claims such as “Recent CDC data shows unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die” left out the fact that this finding showed that in absolute terms, as of December (the latest CDC figures cited in this ABC News piece), about nine unvaccinated Americans per 100,000 were dying from the CCP Virus versus about half a vaccinated American per 100,000 dying. In other words, unvaccinated Americans had a 0.009 percent chance of dying of Covid, versus 0.0005 percent of the vaccinated. And these literally microscopic numbers warranted throwing the lives of tens of millions of Americans into turmoil?

But even if you’ve been in favor of such measures, the latest CDC figures (from April, which you can see at the above link) show that the gap has been cut in half since December in per-100,000 terms and virtually disappeared in absolute terms.

That is, 0.62 unvaccinated Americans per 100,000 were dying of the CCP Virus – about nine times greater than the vaccinated rate of 0.07 Americans per 100,000 versus the 20 times gap last December. That is, many fewer than one of every 100,000 unvaccinated and vaccinated Americans alike is now dying from the virus. And at least as interesting: These numbers mean that since December, the death rate for the unvaxxed has plummeted by 93.11 percent, while the rate for the vaxxed has barely budged.

In addition, and not so coincidentally, the CDC data on hospitalization rates for the vaxxed and unvaxxed display exactly the same trends.

Yet despite this evidence, many businesses are still insisting on some form of vaccine mandate and/or CCP Virus testing for employees, and the Biden administation is still pushing them for federal workers. So much, it seems, for “following the science” as well as for the always-dubious idea of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. 

 

Im-Politic: Race and the Virus

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African Americans, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, ethnicity, healthcare, Hispanics, hospitalization, Im-Politic, Latinos, mortality, Omicron variant, race, senior citizens, Wuhan virus

What role, if any, should race play in medically treating Americans who have contracted the CCP Virus or could be likely victims? The question has gotten awfully important given that the virus’ highly infectious Omicron variant is greatly multiplying the number of cases (though because of asymptomatic spread and a shortage of reliable tests, no one knows how greatly); because for reasons ranging from those much higher case (and therefore hospitalization) numbers to the impact of illness and vaccine mandates on healthcare workers, the hospital system is strained; and because of shortages in treatments.

And the answer that seems best supported by the data is “some role” – because the most comprehensive data does show that race (along with ethnicity) does significantly affect the odds of suffering the most serious infection outcomes (symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization, along with of course death). But by no means should race or ethnicity play a major role – because so many other factors, and above all age, are much stronger determinants of the worst virus consequences.

The argument for prioritizing age begins with the aggregate data – which comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here’s what’s shown by the latest numbers measuring weekly CCP Virus deaths per 100,000 Americans for the week of January 15 by age group (for the most vulnerable) and by race and ethnicity for non-hispanic whites, non-hispanic blacks, and hispanics (the country’s three largest groups according to this typology).

By age group:

75-plus: 3.00

65-74: 0.79

50-64: 0.37

By race/ethnicity

non-Hispanic whites: 0.22

non-Hispanic blacks: 0.35

Hispanics: 0.41

As is obvious, senior citizens (65 and over) of all racial and ethnic groups are by far the most likely to die from the virus – which argues strongly for focusing prevention and treatment tightly on them.

The same holds for CCP Virus-related hospitalizations (keeping in mind what should be the well-known qualification that the government does a lousy job of making the critical distinctions between deaths and hospitalizations caused by the virus, and deaths and hospitalizations of infected victims that were caused by something else).

In this case, the CDC offers not weekly admissions figures per 100,000, but total statistics for the period March 1, 2020 to January 8, 2022 per identical numbers of Americans belonging to these categories. And helpfully, breakdowns are provided for both age and race/ethnic group. Here are the results:

non-Hispanic whites 65-plus years: 1,938.5 

non-Hispanic whites 50-64 years: 811.9

non-Hispanic whites 18-49 years: 287.4 8

non-Hispanic whites 0-17 years: 46.9

non-Hispanic blacks 65-plus years: 3,835.4

non-Hispanic blacks 50-64 years: 2,165.0 

non-Hispanic blacks 18-49 years: 886.3 

non-Hispanic blacks 0-17 years: 126.7

Hispanic or Latino 65-plus years: 3,550.1

Hispanic or Latino 50-64 years: 2,053.3

Hispanic or Latino 18-49: 924.6 6

Hispanic or Latino 0-17: 115.0

The clear conclusion is that a national public health policy focused on preventing CCP Virus-related hospitalization would focus not on any single racial or ethnic group as a whole, but on the following groups in this (descending) order: Non-hispanic blacks over 65, hispanics and latinos over 65, blacks between 50 and 64 years, hispanics and latinos between 50 and 64 years, and non-hispanic whites over 65.

But these figures make another, comparably important point: The differences between blacks over 65 and hispanics and latinos over 65 are pretty modest. So even between these highly vulnerable groups, targeting treatment or prevention strategies according to race and ethnicity doesn’t seem to provide very useful advice. The differences between blacks among blacks from 50 to 64 years of age, hispanics and latinos of the same age group, and white 65 and over are even smaller, and therefore focusing on racial and ethnic considerations seems that much less warranted.

The CDC has also presented mortality data by age and racial/ethnic group simultaneously, but in a slightly different way – with these statistics showing how their virus-related deaths as a percentage of all deaths for these categories compare with that group’s share of the U.S. population overall. Groups whose shares of virus-related deaths are higher than their shares of the population as a whole are more vulnerable than average, and groups whose shares of virus-related deaths are lower than their shares of the total population are less vulnerable than average. Here’s that breakdown for senior citizens (the over 65s), drawn from Figure 3b in the link above) along with their total numbers as of 2019 (from the Census Bureau according to Table 1 in this link):

85-plus years: 5.89 million

non-Hispanic whites: 0.6 percent below

Hispanics: 1.3 percent higher

non-Hispanic blacks: 1.0 percent higher

75-84 years: 15.41 million

non-Hispanic whites: 7.6 percent below

Hispanics: 5.0 percent above

non-hispanic blacks: 3.8 percent above

65-74 years: 31.49 million

non-Hispanic whites: 14.60 percent below

Hispanics: 8.5 percent above

non-Hispanic blacks 6.7 percent above

As should be obvious, when it comes to the oldest seniors, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Hispanics are experiencing CCP Virus-related deaths closely related to their shares of the overall population, there’s little if any reason to discriminate along racial and ethnic lines for virus-fighting policymakers.

The spreads are wider for Americans between 75 and 84, but mainly for non-hispanic whites. The difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks is anything but dramatic.

The situation changes more dramatically for the younger seniors, but again, mainly for non-hispanic whites. Hispanics’ and non-Hispanic blacks’ seem in the same ballpark.

Interestingly, if you look at the charts, black over-vulnerability stays level from there on for the 55-64 and 45-54 age groups, but keeps rising for Hispanics until the 25-34-year cohort . Non-Hispanic whites’ under-vulnerability stabilizes at the same point.

Even more interesting – for a change, the (rightly) embattled CDC seems to have gotten it about right.  Although the agency notes urge healthcare providers and the state governments that regulated them to “carefully consider potential additional risks of COVID-19 illness for patients who are members of certain racial and ethnic minority groups,” it specifies that “Age is the strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes” and its relevant guidance on major risk factors for severe virus outcomes concentrates on medical conditions.

CDC also recommends paying some attention to those who “live in congregate settings, and face more barriers to healthcare,” among other “social determinants of health” that can influence risk, and that “include neighborhood and physical environment, housing, occupation, education, food security, access to healthcare, and economic stability.” 

Such Americans of course are disproportionately black and Hispanic. At the same time, the agency also admits that “we are still learning about how conditions that affect the environments where people live, learn, and work can influence the risk for infection and severe COVID-19 outcomes.” Plus, there’s no shortage of whites facing similar challenges.

Given those uncertainties, the aforementioned healthcare provision shortages, and given that Census pegs the numbers of Americans over 65 at nearly 53 million, it’s clear that protecting the elderly – whatever they look like – should be the unquestioned Job One for U.S. healthcare policy and healthcare providers.              

Im-Politic: Omicron Looks Fairly Mild – Except Against a Key Biden Virus Claim

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden, Biden administration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalization, Im-Politic, Omicron variant, vaccination, vaccines, Wuhan virus

I was struck by the statement made by Anthony S. Fauci on Tuesday that the Omicron variant of the CCP Virus is so hyper-infectious that it will “ultimately find just about everybody.” I wasn’t struck by the words of President Biden’s chief medical adviser because Omicron has found me healthwise. Instead, I was struck because the pandemic keeps finding my blogging – even when I don’t intend to write about it.

And so it’s been today. I started out planning to post an item about the Ukraine crisis and globalization (which I will definitely turn to), but Mr. Biden’s latest virus-related remarks have jerked me right back to the pandemic. Specifically responsible was his claim that unless many more Americans become fully vaccinated, Omicron’s rapid spread will mean that the nation’s hospitals will be crowded with resisters who contract unusually severe cases, leaving “little room for anyone else who might have a heart attack or an injury in an automobile accident or any injury at all.”

This point makes perfect sense. Even if Omicron’s effects are relatively mild for most victims, if the absolute numbers of cases are high enough, even a relatively small percentage of infections serious enough to require hospitalization would be enough to overwhelm the hospital system. And if, as Mr. Biden and so many others insist, the overwhelming majority of those hospitalized are unvaccinated individuals, then the case for mandatory vaccination would look open and shut.

But to use one of the President’s favorite phrases, “Here’s the deal.” Even if every American was fully vaxxed and boosted, if Fauci is right about Omicron’s eventual reach, then the hospital system will get overwhelmed anyway. Just do the math.

The whole U.S. population is a little above 330,000,000. If everyone gets Omicron, that’s 330,000,000 cases. How many are resulting in hospitalizations? The President says that unvaccinated Americans are “seventeen times more likely to get hospitalized” from the CCP Virus than the vaxxed.

This figure seems to come from the latest data kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which finds that for every 100,000 American adults, 67.8 “Covid-19-Associated Hospitalizations” take place each week, versus a rate of only 3.9 hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated. That’s a big difference. But if you project those numbers out to the full 330,000,000 population rather than a sample of 100,000, you get 12,870 fully vaxxed hospitalizations each week.

That figure is a lot smaller than the number of “staffed (operational) acute care beds” in America (534,964, according to the latest count from the American Hospital Association). It’s also a lot smaller than the number of intensive care unit beds (96,5960).

But all by itself, it seems to be enough greatly to stress the heathcare system, given that (as the President noted), it’s got many other responsibilities; given that the 12,870 figure represents the number of new hospital patients added each week; and given that many of these fully vaxxed CCP Virus patients are going to stay hospitalized for a certain period even as new patients in this category keep coming in. 

At the same time, the CDC data on fully vaxxed Covid hospital patients surely creates an understatement for one big reason: They only go up to the week of last November 20. Therefore, they predate the recording of the first U.S. Omicron case (last December 1.)

The United States still lacks comprehensive nation-wide statistics on Omicron-related hospitalizations of the fully vaxxed. But some preliminary numbers indicate that their impact on hospitals will be catastrophic. For example, for the week of last December 27 (more than a month after the latest CDC numbers but just as the first Omicron case was reported), New York State found that 4.59 out of every 100,000 city residents who had been fully vaccinated were hospitalized for the CCP Virus.

That’s a positively infintestimal number. But multiply it out by the total 330,000,000 U.S. population, and that’s more than 1.5 million virus-related hospitalizations of the fully vaxxed. And even if you doubt that these numbers would hold for the entire country (because the United States is big and diverse), a breakthrough hospitalization rate only half that high would still produce more than 750,000 such cases.    

Some more recent figures are even more alarming. As of January 6, the Las Vegas, Nevada area experienced 27,205 breakthrough virus cases (e.g., number of infections of the fully vaxxed), of which 873 were hospitalized. That’s 3.21 percent. Ohio’s official Covid-19 dashboard says that of 53,819 state residents counted as “Covid-19 Hospitalizations,” since January 1, 2021, 2,991 have been  fully vaccinated. That’s 5.56 percent.

According to this January 6 post, in Connecticut, “The overall percentage of fully vaccinated people hospitalized with COVID has also risen to 32 percent, from about 20 percent early last week.”

Massachusetts has reported that as of early January, the state’s hospitals were treating 2,970 patients with confirmed cases of the CCP Virus. Of these, 1,348 were fully vaccinated. That’s more than 45 percent!

In fact, once again, if these numbers are too high by a factor of two, they still add up to overwhelmed hospital systems.

Help is on the way in the form of recently approved treatments (though it looks like due to Biden administration shortsightedness or caution, they’ll be kind of scarce for several months), and in the distinct possibilities that the Omicron wave will crest sooner rather than later, and that follow-on virus strains will be even less virulent. What’s more certain is that Omicron is making a complete – and unnecessarily divisive – mockery of Mr. Biden’s continuing “pandemic of the unvaccinated” claims.

Im-Politic: Covid Derangement Syndrome

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CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, health care, hospitals, Im-Politic, mask mandate, masks, Omicron variant, Politico, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

If there’s emerged an Exhibit A as to how completely incoherent the nation’s public health establishment and medical systems have become on dealing with the CCP Virus (including its super-infectious but generally mild and often asymptomatic Omicron variant), it’s an article yesterday in Politico headlined “Health care workers are panicked as desperate hospitals ask infected staff to return.”

As is so often the case, moreover, this virus-related trend and its fallout has been reported without any allusions to the incoherence. And practically all of the muddle is expressed in the very first paragraph, starting with the very first half of the very first sentence:

“While most health workers are vaccinated, many are still falling sick, exacerbating a staff shortage as more Americans seek hospital care. The reliance on employees who may still be infectious comes despite objections from nurses‘ unions and the American Medical Association, which warned the decision puts patients’ health and safety at risk. And there are no requirements that patients be notified if their caregiver is sick.”

Presumably, when reporter Rachael Levy writes that “most health workers are vaccinated,” she means “fully vaccinated” – including boosters. Yet “many are still falling sick.” Readers never learn how many or, more important, what percentage. But it’s no doubt lots – indeed, enough to create and worsen staff shortages.

That alone should blow a big hole in the various sweeping “vaccines work” claims used, notably, to justify mandates for the jabs, especially since these health care workers by definition must overwhelmingly be individuals young enough and free enough of the special medical conditions to be able to avoid illness serious enough to render them too infeebled to report to work — much less to threaten grave illness or death.

But the headline indicates that the concern of the “panicked” health care workers isn’t simply that the colleagues who believe they should be staying home are crawling in, uncontrollably shedding pathogens and threatening staff and patients alike, and/or are physically incapable of performing their duties adequately.

They’re also concerned that these colleagues are “infected” in the first place.

Yet these worries are loopy for any number of glaringly obvious reasons. For example, if infected health care workers are asymptomatic, they should be fully capable of doing their jobs. In addition, the evidence so far seems to show that most virus victims don’t spread the pathogen (see, e.g., here and here), and when they do, they’re most contagious very early in their infections.

That last point is crucial because it’s behind the latest guidance for health care facilities issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As Levy (thankfully!) reports, this advisory allows such providers “to bring back workers after five days of isolation, instead of 10, without a negative Covid-19 test.” What’s more, “In cases where workforce shortages become extreme, hospitals can bring back staff without any isolation period.”

Stranger still: Presumably the health care workers who so fear their supposedly irresponsible colleagues are, according to their own definitions, behaving very responsibly themselves. In other words, they’re surely individuals who are both fully vaccinated and dedicated mask-wearers.

If they’re vaccinated, of course, it’s now clear that their protection against infection is far from perfect, but that their protection against severe illness and death is very good. That is, if they do get infected, and since they are young-ish and strong-ish, they’ll recover fully and pretty quickly — assuming they experience any symptoms at all.

Further, since they work in hospitals, they’re almost certainly also wearing the kinds of masks that are highly effective in preventing infection, not the cloth masks worn so widely outside hospitals that even the CDC has found provide pretty ineffective protection. So have the worried workers now joined the “vaccines and many masks don’t work at all” camp?

It’s true that the Omicron variant may be a virulent enough spreader to confound both vaccines and boosters and even high quality masks, at least to a significant degree. But if this is the case, to date, the health effects of Omicron spread look much too weak to justify panic or even close for anyone without specific vulnerabilities.

Yes, hospitals are full of people with such vulnerabilities – the patients. But the CDC guidelines contain recommendations for dealing with them.

Not that the CDC has covered itself with glory throughout the pandemic. Or that this specific approach that it’s taken to the health care system will keep everyone involved fully protected.

But as one hospital CEO quoted by Levy reminds, “We don’t have good choices — or the choices that we want.” A new consensus seems to be emerging in the nation that America has to “learn to live” with the CCP Virus. Unless it’s believed that somehow the health care delivery system should be an exception (and should be crippled until somehow something close to Zero Covid is reached without it?) hospital workers need to follow this advice, too.

Im-Politic: It’s Time for Them to Go

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden adminstration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children, coronavirus, COVID 19, Fauci, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, hospitalization, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, Mary T. Bassett, misinformation, New York State, pediatric vaccination, public health, Rochelle Walensky, schools, testing, vaccinations, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

As the New Year brings Americans their third calendar year of coping with the CCP Virus, it’s abundantly clear that there’s no such thing as a firing offense when it comes to the nation’s leading public health authorities. And it’s been evident in not one but two cases over the last week alone.

Case number one involves Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser. Fauci should already be in near-boiling legal water over the likelihood that he lied to Congress in denying that the National Institute of Alergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) never funded dangerous gain-of-function virus-related research in China. Now he’s just (unwittingly) admitted that he’s been guilty of pandemic-related fear-mongering of the first order on the vital issue of safeguarding children’s well-being.

Fauci has long warned about the dangers posed to minors by the virus and linked vaccination of pupils (along with mask requirements for them) to the goal of keeping schools safely opened. And he’s focused not only on pediatric infection numbers, but on hospitalization rates – widely considered a far more serious matter because they supposedly reveal the incidence of serious and potentially fatal infections. As he argued on NBC News‘ “Meet the Press” on August 8:

“There are a lot of children now – all you need to do is do a survey of the pediatric hospitals throughout the country, and you’re seeing a considerable number of young people who are not only infected but who are seriously ill….the numbers compared to the elderly are less, but that’s a false comparison. These kids are getting sick. We’ve really got to make sure we protect them.”

The alarmist nature of his comments should have been clear from the start, as, for example, that week, according to the CCP Virus data tracker maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the virus-related rate of new hospital admissions for Americans under 17 averaged about 0.14 per 100,000 – which comes to an absolute number of about 100 total hospitalizations among the 73.1 million in that age group as of the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.

But as I’ve explained, by that time, a national healthcare leader like Fauci should have been aware of the big problem with the hospitalization data in general – they rarely distinguished between patients who were hospitalized because of the virus, and patients hospitalized for other reasons who happened to test positive for the pathogen once admitted. In other words, many “Covid-related hospitalizations” have had nothing to do with Covid.

Here’s how one expert has explained the problem:

“[I]f you look at the children are hospitalized many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID. What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual, when in fact they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”

“So it’s over counting the number of children who are ‘hospitalized’ with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.”

This expert’s name? Anthony Fauci. But he didn’t make the admission until last week – when total national “Covid-related hospitalizations” for kids still numbered in the low hundreds.

Yet bizarrely, Fauci still favors vaccination for this highly secure demographic cohort, in line with the equally bizarre authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommendation from the CDC.  And this even though the jabs for five-to-fifteen years olds are approved only on an “emergency basis”; even though the evidence used seems to consist of a single trial of some 3,100 children; and even though – unlike far more vulnerable older Americans – these vaccine recipients will mostly have many decades from now for any side effects to emerge.

So on the grounds of spreading virus misinformation alone, Fauci should be gone.

Speaking of pediatric hospitalizations and misinformation, it’s also time to sack new New York State Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett as well. Also last Monday, touting the imperative of pediatric vaccinations, she declared, “Many people continue to think that children do not become infected with COVID. This is not true. Children become infected with COVID and some will become hospitalized. The vaccination coverage remains too low. We need to get child vaccinations up, particularly in the 5-to-11-year-old age group.”

At this time, New York State had recorded 184 child covid hospitalizations (out of a total under-18 population of 4.18 million, according to the latest Census Bureau data). But alarmism wasn’t the worst of Bassett’s offenses. Instead, it was this jaw-dropping admission: 

“The numbers we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection. These were small numbers that we reported in our health alert. That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I’ve now given you some larger numbers, but they’re still small numbers. It really is to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination.”

Lying to the public isn’t a criminal offense – and probably shouldn’t be.  But it sure should be a firing offense. 

According to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who should be facing big job security questions herself due to the nation’s crying shortage of CCP Virus testing capability despite the Biden administration’s backing for sweeping vaccine mandates, her agency’s controversial decision last week on isolation for indivduals with asymptomatic cases stemmed partly from the “relatively low rates of isolation for all of this pandemic. Some science has demonstrated less than a third of people are isolating when they need to.”  Given Americans’ truth-challenged public health officials, reluctance to follow their advice and instructions is easy to understand.            

 

Im-Politic: Despite Omicron, Progress Against the Virus So Far Has Continued

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalization, Im-Politic, mortality, Omicron variant, Washington Post

I wasn’t planning on writing on CCP Virus-related issues today in part because I just posted on them on Saturday. But given today’s stock market rout (so far) and the recent instances of virus-related disruption of sports, education, and business due to fears about the highly contagious Omicron variant, it seems worthwhile to present the latest data on the virus’ ongoing impact on public health so far.

And the big takeaway so far is that despite Omicron’s arrival in the United States and the continuation of the Delta variant’s dominance of reported domestic virus cases, the damage to Americans’ health as best as can be measured has continued a persistent decline.

Although these conclusions need to be seen as very preliminary, they deserve attention for several reasons, especially considering the magnitude of the policy response so far. First, although Omicron was probably present in America well before the first case was confirmed on December 1, it’s now nearly three weeks after that apparent initial infection. So the new variant has been here for a while. Second, the also-highly infectious Delta variant still accounts for fully 97 percent of all reported cases across the country as of yesterday, although certain regions (like the New York City metropolitan area), have recorded a much greater Omicron presence.

Third, it’s getting to be winter throughout the United States. So any new variant that came state-side was inevitably going to pack quite an infection punch simply because respiratory viruses tend to spread faster in cold weather, and mainly because more of us spend more time in indoor spaces with less-than-super-ventilation.

So given all that, here’s what’s been happening since December 1 with the two indicators that tell us the most about the public health impact – hospitalizations and deaths (although, because of reporting methodology problems described here, neither is great):

First, new hospitalization admissions, as measured by daily changes in the seven-day averages (7DAs), which smooth out the random fluctuations that always pop up over shorter periods. And I’ve switched over to getting them straight from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rather than taking them from the Washington Post‘s virus tracker – which also draws from the CDC, and remains very good, but which doesn’t seem to transfer hospitalization information from the agency consistently enough.

On December 1, when the first Omicron case was detected, the 7DA average of these admissions was rising at a five percent rate. By December 4, this rate of increase had hit 16 percent, and stayed in that neighborhood through the ninth. But it was back to the single digits three days later, and has fallen steadily since. As of last Friday, moreover, the 7DA had actually fallen by two percent. So if anything, it looks like the strain on hospitals, has been easing most recently overall in the nation.

The trends in the 7DAs in the daily death counts have been much more volatile, but considerable improvement can be seen here, too. (And these figures come from the Post tracker.)

As of December 1, the 7DA of these counts was down by nearly 22 percent. But it shot up to just over 42 percent on December 3, and stayed above 40 percent through the seventh.

But a dramatic drop-off began right afterwards. On December 8, the 7DA sank all the way down to abut 13.5 percent. The following day, 3.3 percent. And on the tenth, it declined by nearly seven percent. Moreover, this rate kept falling through the fourteenth – and by double-digits on two of those days.

On the fifteenth, it jumped back into positive territory (nearly 7.5 percent), but as of last Friday was back down to a little more than 4.5 percent. (For the record, we have numbers for Saturday, the eighteenth and yesterday, and they were about five and four percent, respectively, but reporting for weekends can be pretty spotty, so don’t make too much of them.)

In other words, American deaths associated with the CCP Virus are still taking place every single day – and in big numbers. On December 1, that day’s count was 2,678. Last Friday, it was 2,099. But that’s down nearly 22 percent. Measured in terms of the more reliable 7DA, they’re up from 1,048 to 1,291 – up more than 23 percent.

But what’s most important – and the most that can realistically be hoped for – is that the rate of increase slows. If these somewhat encouraging trends hold, let’s hope that the Biden administration and other public health authorities recognize that this is what the 7DA data have been showing both on the mortality and hospitalization fronts.

Im-Politic: More Americans-Last Immigration Tripe from The New York Times

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, Immigration, public health, The New York Times, Title 42, Wuhan virus

It looks – embarassingly – like New York Times editorial writers don’t bother to look at the newspaper’s comprehensive vaccine tracker feature. Or at least they didn’t bother when preparing today’s editorial calling for an end to a regulation called Title 42, “an emergency public health order that allows the government to turn away migrants at the nation’s borders during a pandemic.”

According to the edit, a big part of the reason is that “the Covid-19 pandemic is receding.”

But flip to the paper’s “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count” section, and you see that one of the most reliable (though far from perfect) indicators of the pandemic’s virulence – hospitalizations – are no longer declining as steeply as they had been starting in early September. And the daily death count is showing signs of stabilizing after falling rapidly starting in mid-September.

Moreover, the numbers are likely to keep worsening in the coming weeks because winter is coming, and because the CCP Virus in all its variants is seasonal – like many other infectious diseases. In other words, now that the weather is getting colder, some kind of new wave seems sure to arrive.

Incidentally, the edit’s other stated prime rationale for ending Title 42 is just completely bonkers. The Times writes of evidence that’s recently surfaced of an official for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly making clear that “there was little public health rationale for instituting the policy, since the virus was already spreading in the United States by the time the Title 42 order was signed” in March, 2020 under the Trump administration.

In other words, a then-little known and therefore greatly feared disease was metastasizing among the American population, and it was – xenophobic? racist? choose your own disparaging adjective? – to minimize the odds that infected foreigners would make the problem even worse?

And in fact, this last argument illustrates the most fundamental problem with the editorial – and the paper’s overall position on immigration. Times‘ ownership obviously favors an Open Borders-like policy, which is of course perfectly fine and its inalienable right. What’s neither is its unwillingness to show some intellectual honesty and openly say so.

Im-Politic: Fauci Doctors the Facts Again

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chris Wallace, coronavirus, COVID 19, essential workers, Fauci, Fox News, Im-Politic, law enforcement, mortality, Officer Down Memorial Page, police, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, had a ready answer this past Sunday when a news anchor asked him whether or not he bears any responsibility for the growing criticism he’s attracted during the CCP Virus pandemic:

“[I] have stood — always making science, data, and evidence be what we guide ourselves by. And I think people who feel differently, who have conspiracy theories, who deny reality that’s looking em straight in the eye, those are people that don’t particularly care for me.

“And that’s understandable because what I do and I try very hard is to be guided by the truth. And sometimes, the truth becomes inconvenient for some…people, so they react against me. That just is what it is. There’s not much I can do about that…”

Actually, here’s something he can do about it. He can stop presenting facts that are not only completely free-floating but so devoid of any context that they become completely misleading – as he did on the same program.

Asked by Fox News‘ Chris Wallace whether vaccine mandates should be enforced for essential workers like police – many of which oppose the requirements, Fauci declared,

“We now know the statistics, more police officers die of COVID than they do in other causes of death. So, it doesn’t make any sense to not trying to protect yourself as well as the colleagues that you work with.”

Fauci’s claim is correct strictly speaking – at least according to this organization that tracks police deaths in the line of duty. But comparing police virus deaths with other causes of police fatalities has zero to do with how especially susceptible or not officers are to Covid. In fact, the only valid way of determining the relative vulnerability of these law enforcement personnel is to compare their CCP Virus experiences – in this case, mortality – versus that of their closest population-wide peer group.

And what these data make plain as day is that police nationwide are much less likely to die of the virus than those most like them demographically.

The peer group in question is working age adults, and this source pegs their population at 170,975,648 as of last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that through October 13, they’d suffered 233,965 deaths. “involving” the CCP Virus (which RealityChek regulars know is a problematic concept). So that’s a mortality rate of 0.14 percent.

The number of police officers whose deaths have been attributed to having contracted the disease on duty is 479 according to the aforementioned Office Down Memorial Page. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has pegged the nationwide number of police and sheriff’s patrol officers at 654,900. Do the math, and you get a death rate of 0.07 percent. That’s only half the level for the working age adult control group.

Surely one big reason for this disparity is that law enforcement personnel are healthier as a rule than their closest demographic peers. But far from “explaining away” Fauci’s mistake, it’s a point so obvious that he should know it. He should also realize that because, like other essential personnel, policemen and women stayed on the job during the worst of the virus, stayed on it long before vaccines were available, and worked jobs that required lots of personal contact, many surely contracted Covid – and recovered, thereby acquiring natural immunity. Despite his enthusiasm for the mandates, as even Fauci has admitted, this inconvenient (for vaccine zealots) truth of virology is tough to square with calls for mass, indiscriminate, and forced jabbing.

I’m enough of a believer in vaccines’ effectiveness and in the seriousness of the CCP Virus that I cringe every time I hear some pundit or news talker argue that members of the public health establishment like Fauci and the politicians that follow them have supported vaccine mandates and other forms of anti-virus business and behavioral curbs primarily because they’re control freaks. But every time I hear such folks so blatantly and sanctimoniously peddle this kind of misinformation, it makes me wonder.