Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 87

States, including Minnesota, are starting to tell people to loosen isolation or quarantine rules, with a recent decision here to tell day care centers they don’t have to force isolation after supposed contact with a positive case, although they still recommend it.  The reason for these changes is the incredible destruction wrought by forcing kids to miss school or day care and parents to miss work.  But what it reveals that there was never any “science” behind these restrictions.  And if they aren’t needed with the very-transmissible Omicron, why would they be required for less-transmissible variants?

Another thing we continue to see, except from Minnesota, is story after story about “incidental” hospitalizations.  People are starting to understand how the data have been hyped from the start.

And the inestimable IB, our Governor, Little Timmy Walz, is strangely silent on the epidemic.  No mask mandates, no emergencies, nothing but asking for even more testing.  Because he is deeply unpopular and going negative on approval rating in regard to handling of the epidemic.  He is not going to do anything to further inflame the populace.

Here are statistics from Montana showing what Minnesota now hides, probably because it would show the same thing.  Requiring masks in schools does not lower cases compared to schools without forced masking.  In fact it looks like there are more cases in the forced masking schools.  (Montana Info.)  I am trying to get the same data out of Minnesota.

Children are not at much risk from CV-19, no matter how much the public health Nazis try to terrorize us on that issue, and they are at even less risk from Omicron.  This paper examined outcomes in children five and under and confirms that Omicron rarely poses any threat to them.  Here is what is ignored in the study.  Out of 80,000 children, only 300 were hospitalized and there was no distinction between admissions for CV-19 treatment and other admissions.  And I would be willing to bet that the children who were hospitalized almost all have other serious health conditions.  (Medrxiv Paper)

More data from South Africa on Omicron outcomes.  Once again, serious outcomes appear to be less likely with this variant.  These researchers attempted to isolate how much of the change might be due to adaptive immunity in the population and how much is attributable to the variant itself.  They determined that about 75% of the less severe outcomes was due to immune response from prior infection or vax and about 25% to the virus itself.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study compared viral loads in the nose in symptomatic and asymptomatic persons.  Yet another study supporting the utility of routine reporting of cycle number in PCR tests.  In this study, persons who were asymptomatic throughout their infection had significantly higher cycle numbers, and therefore lower viral loads, than those who were presymptomatic when testing positive, and even lower cycle numbers and higher viral loads were present in those who were symptomatic at the time of positive test.  So the cycle number is quite informative about viral load and about like seriousness of infection and level of infectiousness.  (Medrxiv Paper)

A large study from England on vaccine effectiveness over time.  Nothing different that we see in the official UK stats and other research.  Effectiveness against infection starts out high but declines significantly in a few months.  The decline is larger in the elderly.  Effectiveness against hospitalization and death lessens a bit, but really not by much, although again, the decline is more significantly in the elderly. The effect of prior infection does not appear to have been considered.  (NEJM Paper)

North Carolina chimes in with a vaccine effectiveness study as well.  Same usual findings as above.  At least North Carolina explicitly notes that it likely isn’t picking up all the vaxed persons.  But once more, the impact of prior infection, in either sub-group, is completely ignored, which is just stupid in a population with a significant prevalence.  (NEJM Article)

This is another of the studies which are being done with the blatant purpose of presenting misleading data to justify vaccinating children.  This is a disgraceful research purpose.  It purports to identify vaccine effectiveness at preventing serious disease in adolescents.  Please note the extremely low level of events.  Hinders statistical effectiveness assessment.  And the time period is only during the initial weeks and months after adolescents began being admitted.  So I am quite dubious, and while the vaccines may limit the likelihood of adolescent hospitalization, the absolute numbers are very low.  (NEJM Paper)

The immune response in a number of people with Omicron breakthru infections after infection was studied in this research.  The infection prompted a fairly good recall reaction but further encouraged development of non-spike protein responses.  (Medrxiv Paper)

It is apparent to anyone who is actually interested in “the Science”, that the immune response following infection is pretty darn good.  This paper confirms that people who are infected and then vaxed have a broader and stronger response to vaccination than do those who were not infected.  I cannot understand the refusal to acknowledge the power of the immune system to develop a better response to infection than a vaccine can create.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And this letter describes findings on neutralization of Omicron by vaxed persons or those with prior infection.  It finds that there is lesser neutralization of Omicron in vaxed persons, but also in those with prior infection.  People who were both infected and vaxed had greater neutralization.  (NEJM Letter)