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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 89

By January 18, 2022Commentary

Find out if the current wave has peaked in Minnesota with this week’s data, depending on how screwed up DOH processing is.  We apparently haven’t reached peak lunacy with renewed calls for more testing, more masking, more of everything that hasn’t worked so far.

I know many of you are trying hard to fight against masking children especially.  If you haven’t seen it, this article is a good summary of why there is no reason to believe that it does anything to limit spread.  And pretending this isn’t hurting children is a delusional, despicable act.  (BI Report)

Here is a study showing why I both think the level of testing we do is crazy and is preventing us from getting out of the epidemic obsession, and that CV-19 will just be out there like a lot of other respiratory viruses and at any given time a lot of us will have the bug in our nose.  Look at the levels of viruses found in pretty routine swabbing pre-epidemic.  (JID Study)

This is a somewhat well-thought-of epidemic tracker and projection site.  One of the things they do is estimate the percent of people ever infected in a state.  For Minnesota, they are estimating that rate at over 70%.  Well over 70% of Minnesotan’s are vaccinated.  You may be able to see where I am going with this.  First, if Covidestim is right, there are about two and a half additional undetected infections in the state for every detected one.  But more importantly, even if every unvaxed person was a case, over half of vaxed Minnesotan’s have been infected, and a lot of those have to be after they were vaxed.  (CV Model Site)

And another paper along the same lines finds a lower rate of total immunity for Minnesota.  Now this is an interesting paper because it estimates, as of the end of August 2021, four buckets–vax no prior infection, vax prior infection, prior infection unvaxed, and unvaxed no prior infection.  So for Minnesota these numbers are 6% with a vax and an infection (not clear how many are breakthroughs), 6% with an infection, no vax, and 45% vax only.  This is a clear undercount, even using the end of August as the estimation date.  First of all, they only have a 12% total infection rate, but the official state numbers have over 20% of the population testing positive at some point.  And there total vax number is also an undercount.   (JID Article)

Nature generally knows best, having been formed through hundreds of millions of years of evolution.  So we should expect that immunity following infection is pretty good and likely better than vaccine-derived immunity.  This review of research and data on reinfections basically comes to that conclusion.  It finds strong protection against reinfection and insignificant lessening of protection for up to a year following infection.  And natural immunity is very protective against serious disease. Vaccination may increase protection in people with a prior infection somewhat, but the authors conclude that immunity following infection should be treated as equivalent to vaccination.  (SSRN Study)

Apparently early data from Israel suggests a second booster or fourth dose is not helpful and doesn’t prevent Omicron infection.  At some point we have to recall how adaptive immunity actually works.  IT DOESN’T STOP EXPOSURE.  And over-sensitive PCR tests will turn exposure into a “case”.  And there are reasons to think it can be harmful to the immune system to keep giving these doses.  (Israel Story)

This research from Germany is designed to support vaccinating those with prior infection.  It finds that among this group, vaccination increases the level of neutralizing antibodies against Delta and Omicron.  My biggest problem here is that it ignores the non-antibody aspects of infection-derived immunity, which other research shows are effective against these variants.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And here is another piece of research making just that point, that T cell responses against Omicron appear pretty good.  All groups, including vaxed with two or three doses and prior infected had good T cell response against the variant.  Third dose appeared better, at least in short-term followup, and prior infection plus vax also was slightly better than prior infection alone.   But the T cell response from a prior infection alone was far better than that from two doses of vaccine.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Join the discussion 3 Comments

  • Rob says:

    About the only people that may not have been exposed to covid at this point are mountain men – even people stuck on deserted islands have been exposed at this point.. It’s endemic, and we’re living with it pretty well despite all the government attempts to prevent endemicity and foment panic.

  • Ann in L.A. says:

    I came across one of the more angry-making statistics I’ve seen so far.

    LA County has a dashboard that tracks cases in K-12 schools*. One of the charts details “outbreaks”, defined as 3 or more “epidemiologically-linked” cases within 2 weeks of each other, where the cases can’t be blamed on outside connection between the people.

    From the notes at the end of the chart: “Epidemiologically-linked means that the cases were present at some point in the same setting during the same time while infectious.” They aren’t talking about genomic testing to see if the cases have the same strain of c19, and thus likely that the transmission was actually in the school setting. They are merely saying: these three or more people all got covid within 14 days of each other while the others might have been contagious.

    This is the kind thing the prevention-maximalists crow about: outbreaks in schools are so dangerous, that schools themselves should essentially cease to exist!! Teachers will die!!!!!

    Except, the chart lists 29 “outbreaks”.

    27 of the 29 were tied to “Youth Sports” and not to classrooms.

    Of the two “Classroom” outbreaks, there were 18 students testing positive, and…wait for it….one (1), just one staff member who tested positive. They also list 223 “Student Close Contacts” who tested positive, which suggests to me the outbreak was outside the school and the 18 students were not giving it to each other or to that one luckless staff member. There are over 600,000 students in LAUSD.

    Since schools reopened on August 16, 2021, Los Angeles has seen strong Delta and Omicron surges, for a total number of official cases of: 724,802, or about 7% of the entire population of the county.

    So of the 724,802 cases, one was tied to a staff member testing positive with a connection to a classroom.

    One.

    * http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/education/index.htm

    Note: The Los Angeles government shut down all in-person learning at all preschool-12 schools, public and private, for all but the most vulnerable students most of last year. All other students were remote starting in March 2020 until limited and distanced in-person was allowed last spring.

    There continue to be hair triggers for shutting classrooms and schools, where one case shuts down a classroom, three or so shut down the school for days. So, really, instead of this being 2 years worth of statistics, it really only applies to August 16 2021 – January 9 2022 when LAUSD has mostly been open, about 4 months. The earliest outbreak on the list is from 9/31/2021.

    Note: The county separately lists all cases in an education setting, but they roll in colleges and universities into the total. In other words, young adults living in dorms are being counted–there probably 50-100 colleges and universities in the county–making the data too broad to be useful.

  • Dan says:

    I think you answered my question about the clown I just saw on ABC news trying to scare people saying if you had Covid but are unvaxed you aren’t protected against re infection?

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