You may have noticed the headlines about the CDC director acknowledging that the agency made mistakes during the epidemic. Let me assure you she does not understand the actual mistakes made, but means that they should have lied more to the American people and promoted lockdowns and school closures and constant testing and masking even harder. The agency has learned nothing and during the current pathetic administration has become nothing but a political tool.
While the US, which hates its children based on everything we are doing to them, endured steep learning losses during the epidemic, particularly among minority children; Sweden, which kept its schools open, saw no learning loss at all. But maybe that is because they kept the big picture on children’s welfare firmly in mind. (IJER Article)
To show you what a complete nothing a CV-19 infection is at this point, this study of people who had antibodies indicating an infection found that 56% were unaware they had been infected and only 10% of these reported any symptom. Astounding, simply astounding. So most of the population likely has been infected and the majority really had either no illness or extremely mild illness. Why do we even call this an infection or an illness? Why are we tracking this epidemic at all anymore. (JAMA Article)
The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in the UK has consistently tried to apply a rational approach to the epidemic. Is this article by the principals there, the complete lack of evidence around the efficacy of masks in preventing transmission is discussed. And the most important question is why the “authorities” completely failed to do any really studies on mask effectiveness. (CEBM Article)
One more pretty well done study analyzing the effect over time of a prior infection, vaccination or a combination on the risk of a subsequent infection. In all cases, the risk of a subsequent infection grows over time, suggesting a lessening of immune response, which we should expect given that CV-19 is not particularly threatening to most people. And a prior infection provides a somewhat lower risk of subsequent re-infection than does vaccination alone, although a booster appears to provide similar protection to that of a prior infection. A similar effect was found for hospitalization risk. (Medrxiv Paper)
The study from Portugal is a little hard to follow, because the vax rate in the country is extremely high, but it basically says that a prior Omicron infection provides substantial protection against reinfection by a later Omicron variant infection at 3 months, but that lessens substantially by 5 months. Because of the high vax rate, the ultimate lesson appears to be that even the combination of prior infection and vax is not particularly good at stopping a subsequent infection. But by all means let’s keep obsessing about getting people vaxed. (Medrxiv Paper)
Another study on re-infections, this time from Iceland. During Omicron, reinfections soared, including among those who were also vaxed. Protection from either vax or prior infection lessened over time. Nothing is going to stop constant exposure to and “infection” by CV-19, but as other research summarized in this post indicates, that has no clinical meaning. (JAMA Paper)
The CDC notes the challenges posed to tracking the epidemic by home testing in this paper. The agency analyzed the results of self-tests which reported to the manufacturer and compared it to the lab tests which CDC gets results of. What is truly astounding is what a big business CV-19 testing is and many tens of billions of dollars have been wasted on testing. In any event it is apparent from the relatively small sample of all home tests that were reported that there are a huge number of missed infections and re-infections in the total official case numbers. (CDC Article)
A study from Gambia is another look at what happened with other respiratory viruses during the CV-19 epidemic. They continued to be present particularly in children, and there was lesser CV-19 infection in children. (Medrxiv Paper)