My father, who is 75 years old and at risk, tested positive a week ago. His primary care physician immediately called in a prescription for Paxlovid to a local pharmacy (my mother had called the pharmacy to confirm it was in stock). He began taking the treatment that same day.
I wonder if there is a correlation in NYC between new cases and their overall relaxation of pandemic policies. They are no longer checking vaccination cards at the doors of restaurants and entertainment venues. I felt a lot safer in the City last fall and winter than I do now.
These waves of covid have nearly shut down businesses and healthcare in Ireland, but fewer people wear masks. I hope people will wear them again; the covid waves are not sustainable if they come every few months. On the plus side, kn95 masks are fantastic. Thanks so much for the work you do. Stay safe.
I just wanted to thank you for your newsletter. As a fellow academic and mother of a school-age kiddo, I can only imagine how much time and effort it takes to assemble the data and write-up these great summaries for the public. My family (which includes an older adult with chronic health conditions) is dealing with a COVID positive case for the first time. We're navigating Ag vs. PCR tests, quarantine vs. isolation, and weighing antiviral treatment vs. monoclonal antibodies all in this short time frame of a few days. I have been combing through your newsletters to make sense of it all. I'm very grateful to have this evidence-based information source. Thank you!
What distortion to the BA.,2 infection curve does the current wide availability (and presumably use) of home testing kits create? Do positive results on such tests getting factored into the public tracking data? If not, are pre- and post- home testing era curves commensurate? Or do we need to recenter the data?
What are the latest data about gender-specific mortality rates. In first half 2020, several reports of men having significantly higher mortality rates due to COVID-19. What are the data now: Gender-specific mortality rates by age? by vaccine status? by COVID-19 variant? Thank you.
Here in Oregon, the OHA is scaling down its newsletter with the hard data and going to biweekly. Mandates are coming off, the Governor's emergency powers are being allowed to expire. The general attitude in Salem seems to be "it's over.". Not so fast, please. Variant Omicron XE is in the UK and cases are again ramping up over there. The American public health community should slow walk their rush to demobilize.
In the US, not everyone qualifies for Paxlovid, and those who do might have conflicts with their existing medicines (such as Simvistatin). I wish the FDA would EUA alternative early treatments such as Fluvoxamine for those who can’t get or shouldn’t take Paxlovid. The TOGETHER study reinforced positive findings on Fluvoxamine as early treatment, plus it’s cheap, easy to mass produce, and has few side effects.
Is there an analysis of the fraction of infections reflected in case counts? I see Mercer County, NJ, has 98/100K new cases in the last week but Princeton’s universal testing program has 1.7% of faculty/staff newly asymptomatically positive. Would it be correct to conclude case counts are off by a factor of 17?
Great update! Love the log charts. Really easy to see the rate of change. Straight lines are exponential. For a long while in the last wave, extrapolation was a good predictive tool. When actuals vary from the prediction, something changed.
When you plot something in log scale, it means that each major line on the y axis is 10x the previous major line. So the step is something like 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc.
the first practical application of this is that you can show higher and lower case counts more effectively on the same so you can better see changes in cases counts at low levels.
The other practical application here is that the slope of the line on a log plot reflects the acceleration or deceleration of cases. So if you have a line sloping upward, that shows cases are accelerating.
Be sure to read comments below while keeping in mind that there are two ways the verbiage "log scale" gets used. One kind of plot (SEMI-LOG) uses a linear scale on one axis and a logarithmic scale on the other. A different kind of plot (LOG-LOG) uses a logarithmic scale on both axes.
It’s a fair clarification. When you plot time series data, it is typically only the Y-axis that is log scale, so most covid19 case data falls into that category.
How does one plan to get post-infection treatment such as Paxovid?
My father, who is 75 years old and at risk, tested positive a week ago. His primary care physician immediately called in a prescription for Paxlovid to a local pharmacy (my mother had called the pharmacy to confirm it was in stock). He began taking the treatment that same day.
I wonder if there is a correlation in NYC between new cases and their overall relaxation of pandemic policies. They are no longer checking vaccination cards at the doors of restaurants and entertainment venues. I felt a lot safer in the City last fall and winter than I do now.
These waves of covid have nearly shut down businesses and healthcare in Ireland, but fewer people wear masks. I hope people will wear them again; the covid waves are not sustainable if they come every few months. On the plus side, kn95 masks are fantastic. Thanks so much for the work you do. Stay safe.
Thank you, Dr. J, for the continuing goodness you deliver to us.
I just wanted to thank you for your newsletter. As a fellow academic and mother of a school-age kiddo, I can only imagine how much time and effort it takes to assemble the data and write-up these great summaries for the public. My family (which includes an older adult with chronic health conditions) is dealing with a COVID positive case for the first time. We're navigating Ag vs. PCR tests, quarantine vs. isolation, and weighing antiviral treatment vs. monoclonal antibodies all in this short time frame of a few days. I have been combing through your newsletters to make sense of it all. I'm very grateful to have this evidence-based information source. Thank you!
What distortion to the BA.,2 infection curve does the current wide availability (and presumably use) of home testing kits create? Do positive results on such tests getting factored into the public tracking data? If not, are pre- and post- home testing era curves commensurate? Or do we need to recenter the data?
What are the latest data about gender-specific mortality rates. In first half 2020, several reports of men having significantly higher mortality rates due to COVID-19. What are the data now: Gender-specific mortality rates by age? by vaccine status? by COVID-19 variant? Thank you.
Here in Oregon, the OHA is scaling down its newsletter with the hard data and going to biweekly. Mandates are coming off, the Governor's emergency powers are being allowed to expire. The general attitude in Salem seems to be "it's over.". Not so fast, please. Variant Omicron XE is in the UK and cases are again ramping up over there. The American public health community should slow walk their rush to demobilize.
In the US, not everyone qualifies for Paxlovid, and those who do might have conflicts with their existing medicines (such as Simvistatin). I wish the FDA would EUA alternative early treatments such as Fluvoxamine for those who can’t get or shouldn’t take Paxlovid. The TOGETHER study reinforced positive findings on Fluvoxamine as early treatment, plus it’s cheap, easy to mass produce, and has few side effects.
Thank you for another informative post.
Is there an analysis of the fraction of infections reflected in case counts? I see Mercer County, NJ, has 98/100K new cases in the last week but Princeton’s universal testing program has 1.7% of faculty/staff newly asymptomatically positive. Would it be correct to conclude case counts are off by a factor of 17?
Great update! Love the log charts. Really easy to see the rate of change. Straight lines are exponential. For a long while in the last wave, extrapolation was a good predictive tool. When actuals vary from the prediction, something changed.
can you please say more about log scales?
When you plot something in log scale, it means that each major line on the y axis is 10x the previous major line. So the step is something like 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc.
the first practical application of this is that you can show higher and lower case counts more effectively on the same so you can better see changes in cases counts at low levels.
The other practical application here is that the slope of the line on a log plot reflects the acceleration or deceleration of cases. So if you have a line sloping upward, that shows cases are accelerating.
Be sure to read comments below while keeping in mind that there are two ways the verbiage "log scale" gets used. One kind of plot (SEMI-LOG) uses a linear scale on one axis and a logarithmic scale on the other. A different kind of plot (LOG-LOG) uses a logarithmic scale on both axes.
It’s a fair clarification. When you plot time series data, it is typically only the Y-axis that is log scale, so most covid19 case data falls into that category.