Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 51

Been a busy but productive week so far and more to come.  It is beginning to turn.  People are beginning to understand that the vaccines will not end the epidemic, not as long as we test like crazy and have this obsession, this coronamonomania about CV-19.  First we were told that wearing masks would make this go away.  Then we were told the vaccines would make it go away.  I think the politicians and public health experts going away will make this go away.  Time to move on.  I will review this more in detail tomorrow, but the state basically acknowledged what we have been saying about breakthrough events today.  Now the question is how do we get a more sane public policy based on reality.  Missed catching up on research, so that is the focus here.

Thanks to Phil Kerpen on Twitter for bringing this to our attention.  Here are the latest CDC estimates on the burden of illness from CV-19, by age group.  Not clear how much validity some of the assumptions have, like detected number of infections versus total infections.  And it is laughable to imagine that there are deaths caused by CV-19 but not attributed to it.  If anything, reported deaths are a significant overestimate of actual deaths.  But the funniest thing is in the 0-17 age group in the second table, somehow symptomatic illnesses are higher than total infections, which seems mathematically impossible since a symptomatic illness is a subset of all infections.  Anyway, worth a spin through.  (CDC Data) 

If you want the obvious explanation for why we are seeing such a surge in breakthrough deaths in the elderly in Minnesota and elsewhere, this study helps provide it.  Among LTC residents, within five to six months after vaccination, almost none had any significant antibody response.  Some who had breakthroughs saw a restoration of antibody response, suggesting again that infection provides a stronger response than does vaccination, even in the elderly.  (Medrxiv Study)

This research from India further buttresses the hypothesis that natural infection creates a stronger immune response.  The authors compared the response from vaccination and infection and found that the infection-induced one was still present after ten months, particularly the T cell component, and the natural infection response was more effective against Delta than was the vaccine-induced one.  Two vaccines in common use in India were compared.  The AstraZeneca one prompted stronger antibody response than a local Indian one that is a conventional attenuated virus vaccine, but the Indian one had a stronger T cell response.   (Medrxiv Paper)

This study tracked breakthrough infections in Dutch health care workers.  The workers contracted both Alpha and Delta variant infections and some had relatively high viral loads.  None were hospitalized, all had moderate disease at worst and several were asymptomatic.  Some appeared to have had a prior infection as well.  And antibody levels were up substantially following the breakthrough infection.  The numbers were too small to draw any real conclusions, but the Delta cases had much lower viral loads than the Alpha cases.  (JID Article)

And this breakthrough study comes from the Mayo Clinic and examines hospitalizations.  An increased number of breakthrough hospitalizations was observed  over time during the period from the start of January up through the end of August, but this was in Florida in part when when community transmission was high.  The authors attribute the increased transmission to Delta, but with no explanation why it would be any different than with Alpha.  In total 18% of cases were breakthrough infections and 12% of these were hospitalized, but this was up to 18% by the end of the period.  Most occurred after Delta became dominant but this is also when the vaccine effectiveness was waning so it is too confounded to blame it on Delta.  Most of the breakthrough hospitalizations were in the elderly and those with serious chronic disease.  As with most of these supposed experts, their takeaway is we need to keep masking, because that has worked so well.   (JID Article)

School children rarely transmit to each other according to this very intensive contact tracing and sequencing study from Norway.  And please note that there was no masking, no masking at all in the schools.  I struggle to understand how every school child in Norway has not been infected under these circumstances.  (SSRN Study)

Interesting study describing testing methods to distinguish between vaccination and immunity from infection.  Adaptive immunity from infection includes an antibody response to membrane proteins and the authors find that this reliably indicates immunity from infection versus vaccination.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And yet another breakthrough study, this one from England.  Out of a large population, there were about 17,000 breakthrough infections, of which 955 were hospitalized and 145 died.  LTC residents were most at risk, no surprise.  As were persons with immune system compromising diseases.   (Medrxiv Paper)

This study is from China, but published in a very reputable journal and apparently has gone through peer review.  It discusses a wide range of body chemistry reactions to CV-19 vaccination.  Not so worried about the effect in adults, but am worried about the impact to children, who have a constantly developing set of body systems, including immune systems.  (Cell Article)