Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 150

There are lots of cases out there, and there will continue to be.  Almost all of them are mild.  There are some hospitalizations, but at this point the great majority have nothing to do with CV-19 treatment, they are incidentals.  There are very few deaths, and again, those are mostly wrongly attributed to CV-19.  We should be over this but people cling to it.  We still have places requiring masks, requiring children to be vaccinated.  Here is the appropriate attitude–as expressed by an Israeli immunologist, saying it is time to admit our response to the epidemic failed.  It didn’t stop the spread and it did inflict immense damage.  I think I wrote basically these same words quite some time ago:  “Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail.”  (Israel Letter)

Here is the definitive write-up of the North Dakota school masking study, which should put the nail in the coffin of the abhorent idea of masking children in school, but likely won’t as long as the nuts are in charge.  It shows no significant difference in case levels in schools with and without a masking policy, in the same geographical area.  (RS Study)

And speaking of hurting children, here is another study showing that during the epidemic a number of beneficial vaccinations were missed, and the burden of that missed care fell disproportionately on minority and disadvantaged children, in fact almost all the missed vax occurred in this subgroup.  The study is from Canada but the same results would be found in the US.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Yet another study, in the Kaiser system, found that two doses of vaccine had basically zero effectiveness against Omicron infection and limited effect on hospitalization risk.  A booster restored some protection, particularly against hospitalization, but the follow-up period was not long enough to detect the inevitable fall of effectiveness from boosters as well.  (SSRN Study)