I Am Done With Coronamonomania, Part 2

Been a couple of weeks, the spaces between these are getting longer, and one day they will just be gone.

Here is a metareview of research on learning loss during the epidemic, which is pretty much all due to school closures by nut jobs like Fat Timmy Walz.  Not only did kids not learn as much in “virtual” school, but large numbers of poor and minority students in particular simply dropped out and many haven’t returned.  Why should they when they can become criminals, make a lot of money and not have to worry about being caught and punished.  The impact is generally lifelong–a permanent reduction in lifetime earnings and other indicia of a successful life.  (SSRN Paper)

The CV-19 vaccines have some adverse events associated with them.  To assess the relative risk of getting or not getting vaccinated, however, you need to assess whether the same events might occur if you were infected and what the likelihood of getting infected is if you are vaxed versus unvaxed.  This study looks at clotting events.  While there was some increased risk associated with the vax, there was a greater risk after infection.  Not clear to me, however, how much being vaxed reduces the risk of infection, or at least an infection serious enough to prompt a clotting event.  The authors’ identified a lower risk of clotting after infection in those who were vaxed versus the unvaxed.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study examined the pattern of emergency medical services visits to patients’ homes before, during and after the epidemic, using the Mayo Clinic network, which is the sole provider of such visits in much of its service area.  EMS visits can be important to quickly deal with serious exacerbations of chronic diseases, like heart attacks, strokes, low or high blood sugar, accidents, etc.  Not calling when symptoms are present can result in death or other serious consequences.  There was a 29% decrease in calls during the epidemic and the severity of the calls increased, with over 90% requiring transport to a medical facility.  Calls for overdoses increased and those for car accidents declined.   (Medrxiv Study)

Models used to project the course of the CV-19 epidemic were terrible, just awful.  One of the problems was that they had no ability to deal with the extensive variation in people’s susceptibility to infection, their level of contacts and their propensity to transmit.  This study from the Netherlands examines changes in contact patterns among different age groups.  Average contacts remain lower than before the epidemic but this appears to be largely concentrated in working age groups where work from home is common.  Tracking contact patterns is important if we are to have worthwhile models.  (Medrxiv Paper)

I thing it is generally accepted by now that the CV-19 vaccines rapidly lost effectiveness over a few months, particularly against infection.  This paper examined why that might be true, finding that the mRNA vaccines rarely induced the formation of long-lasting bone marrow precursor immune cells.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Australia had an extreme lockdown and a very high rate of vaccination.  Nothwithstanding this, a study of the prevalence of CV-19 vaccines in children in the country finds that over 90% had antibodies, with at least 67% having been infected, as determined by the presence of nucleocapsid antibodies in addition to spike ones.  There was no difference in infection rates in vaxed and unvaxed children.  (Medrxiv Paper)