Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 28

I am in serious backlog status on research, trying to catch up in this post.

Another dreadful briefing by the Minnesota DOH last week, fulfilling their mission as spearhead of the terror campaign.  Funny though, how they de-emphasize the rapidly rising proportion of breakthrough events.  Concern exists about hospital capacity.  No mention of hospital vaccine mandates leading to dismissal of workers and reducing capacity.  Lot of booster talk.  Quote of the briefing, “we know people are tired of the epidemic, tired of the fear”.  Ironically hilarious, since they push the fear and terror.  And the only useful fact from the briefing, the average age of people dying from CV-19 after vaccination is 78.5.  Funny how they use these statistics now to try to dampen concern about breakthroughs, but wouldn’t mention them when they were terrifying the general population.

Today the state reported 31 deaths.  One occurred in November 2020.  How does it take that long to figure out a death was supposedly due to CV-19?  But 28 occurred in September.  We have a massive death toll in September.  And these are almost all quite old people, and most of them must be vaxed.  Sooner or later the state is going to have to come clean on deaths in the vaxed population.

Here is another supposed meta-review of vaccine effectiveness.  The study included both clinical trial data and real-world observational trials.  It shows what you would expect, that the vaccines were highly effective, at least in the short term, against symptomatic infection.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study continues to reflect what we expect in regard to the vaccines–the response is weaker with old age, and prior infection is associated with a stronger response.  (JID Article)

A study from Italy on early breakthrough infections finds that viral loads are generally lower, infections more likely to be asymptomatic, but in some cases virus was cultured from these persons.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Vaccination breakthrough events in the VA was examined in this study.  (Medrxiv Paper)   The population studied is relatively old and the follow-up period is obviously variable across the several million people vaccinated in the VA system.  Initially, the rate of infections and hospitalizations was very low in the vaccinated population.  But as other research has shown, that protection lessened after a few months.  The mRNA vaccines were more effective than the adenovirus ones.

Israel is closely watched as its population is highly vaxed, but had significant case waves and the country then began administering boosters.  The country also has good data availability.  This research found that while the original two dose regime still provided good protection against serious disease, but lessening in the summer and then protection appeared to increase with the advent of boosters.  (Medrxiv Study)

Your upper respiratory tract is the line of first defense against attempted infection.  This paper showed a rapid increase in antibodies to spike protein in saliva in the first few weeks following vaccination, but those levels dropped quickly in following weeks.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This is an interesting paper on memory B cells following infection.  Small number of hospitalized patients were the subjects, some with pretty mild disease, some with more severe disease.  In this case, the people with the milder disease had a stronger memory B cell response.  But also importantly, the memory B cells were still present five months after infection, meaning there was a population available for reactivation.   (Medrxiv Paper)

The reproductive number associated with CV-19 is a largely misunderstood and miscalculated number.  It supposedly indicates the infectiousness of a pathogen.  This paper is interesting because it suggests that spread is mostly occurring in localized nodes, not across a wider community, so that R is always close to one.   (Medrxiv Paper)

If you like being frightened of the virus, this paper may be for you.  Not sure I completely understood it, but the authors studied the replication of coronavirus in a cultured cell line over many generations.  They appear to have identified circumstances in which virus mutants without spike protein still were able to transmit and infect.  Scary, boys and girls, very scary.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Here is a good website for another perspective on the epidemic trend, both nationally and state by state.  They don’t seem to have a clear direction for Minnesota either.  (Covidstim Site)