Coronamonomania Thrives in Darkness, Part 94

Now that we are getting deaths by date they actually occurred in Minnesota, you see some interesting things.  On Thursday, 4 deaths were reported, 3 of them occurred in the first week in February, almost 6 months ago.

Here is a recent study Alex Berenson is using in his terror campaign to show that vaccines don’t work.  (CDC Study).  As usual, Alex is a little statistics and logic-challenged when it comes to vaccines.  I am going to give you the full facts that Alex won’t.  The study was done among gold miners in French Guiana.  Note that this occupation is subject to respiratory issues, that the median age was 53, so an older population and that the rate of pre-existing health conditions were very high.  24 of the 44 employees had positive tests.  87% of these supposed positives were symptomatic but none had serious illness.  The positives that were sequenced were all the Gamma variant that will be the next terror source.  They broke up the group strangely so you have to follow closely to get the gist.  Of the 44 employees 15 had been previously infected and 29 hadn’t.  Out of the 29 who had not been infected before, 25 were vaxed, 4 were not.  Out of the 25 vaxed employees, 15 tested positive.  Out of the 4 unvaxed, 3 tested positive.  Small numbers, but not as high a percent of vaxed as unvaxed were positive.  No data on relative ages in each group.  Now among the previously infected group of 15, there were 6 positives.  So a lot of positives among both vaxxed and previously infected employees.  The important thing to note is that everyone who was positive who was vaccinated had a cold, nothing worse.  This in an older population with many individual with poor health status and working in disease inducing locale.

What kind of immune response do children, who rarely have serious disease, mount when they are infected by CV-19.  The researchers examined the antibody response among children and adults in a large number of households and looked for antibodies to the seasonal coronaviruses as well.  (Medrxiv Paper).  About 34% of cildren and 58% of adults had antibodies.  The children were 5 times more likely than adults to have not had symptoms.  Despite this the children had a stronger and longer antibody response.  Symptomatic and asymptomatic persons had similar antibody responses.

According to this study, which is a derivative of one done by the CDC, children do transmit in the home.  (NEJM Article).  I ripped this study before when it was a CDC paper, so not going to waste my breath again, except to note that among other things it shows mask-wearing was not associated with a reduction in cases.  Also some nice tricky use of statistics to make it look like the secondary attack rate was higher than it was.

On the other hand, this research finds little spread from a large college campus to the surrounding community.  (Medrxiv Paper).  Done at the University of Michigan, the researchers used genome sequencing to determine that while there was substantial spread on campus and in the community, very rarely did transmission occur from the campus into the community.

Another vaccine study from Israel, where vaccines are supposedly failing to do the job.  (SSRN Study).  The study tracked 0ver 9000 long-term care workers in Israel, comparing fully vaxed to unvaxed ones.  Despite the unvaxed group having shorter average followup, the vaccines were 89% effective in preventing infection.  Viral loads were also notably lower in the vaxed group when infection did occur.  Looks pretty effective to me.

If you test everyone, everyday, whether they have symptoms or not, you will prevent transmission, right?  A cynic like me will say, of course not, just another dumb, unproven, theoretical idea.  A randomized cluter study from the UK examined the effect of daily testing compared to mandatory isolation for contacts of persons who had a positive test.  (UK Study).   Some schools kept making contacts stay home and some used daily testing.  Made no difference, the rate of cases was the same among both groups.  The loss of days of school was also about the same.  The authors suggest that daily testing could obviate the need for mandatory isolation of contacts, but it looks to me like you should just drop mandatory isolation, period.