The Economist used global excess deaths to arrive at the true death toll from the pandemic with a 95% confidence interval.
"Although the official number of deaths caused by #COVID19 is now 7m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 27.5m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 17.8m and 30.8m additional deaths."
4 years ago today, Dr. Li Wenliang warned of a suspected SARS patient in a Wuhan WeChat group. It went viral, becoming the earliest warning of what we now know as #COVID19.
Days later, he was arrested for “making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak.”
He returned to work, contracted COVID from a patient, and died on February 7, 2020.
People were punished & died trying to keep others safe. Four years later, we still can't get people to care, mask, or protect each other.
City of Hope in Duarte, California, has maintained masking requirements, and this has prevented hospital-acquired #COVID19 there entirely, according to Vijay Trisal, MD, chief medical officer at City of Hope.
“Our policies enabled us to achieve zero nosocomial infections, zero outbreaks.”
“Stop trying to get people to wear a mask. They're never going to do so.”
“Stop trying to get people to stop smoking. They're never going to do so.”
“Stop trying to get people to wear seatbelts. They're never going to do so.”
“Stop trying to get doctors to wash their hands. They're never going to do so.”
The future is changed and lives are saved--eventually--by people willing to continually encourage people to do unpopular but safe things. #COVID19#WearAMask
In today's remarkable right-wing self-own, crazy, COVID-minimizing, MAGA Laura Loomer admits to having Long #COVID19 without realizing it.
Tweet: Food doesn’t have much taste these days. It’s tough to find something that does. @LauraLoomer reply: It’s not just you. I don’t know what it is but food tastes very weird these days. It started to happen around COVID. Things don’t have much flavor anymore.
If you paid for funeral expenses for someone who died in the US, and their death certificate mentions COVID as a cause, you may be eligible for up to US$9,000 in funeral expense assistance from the US federal government.
I dedicate this post to all the people who think Sweden did the right thing with #COVID19.
Study: “During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway... We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process about its political culture and the lack of accountability of decision-makers to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Interesting STUDY on the risks of #COVID19 infection in a university setting in China.
The risk of infection of susceptible students per 45-min lesson was 1%. (That adds up fast with 15 classes/week for many students.)
An occupancy rate of 50% reduced infection risk by 62%.
Fresh air decreased risk by 81.1%.
All students wearing N95 respirators reduced risks by 96%.
So, which of these mitigations are we doing to protect students? None. We are doing none of them.
From Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
"Until now, people who suffered mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 were thought to have dodged the brunt of the virus’s brutal side effects. But new evidence has revealed that anyone infected with COVID is at higher risk for heart issues—including clots, inflammation, and arrhythmias—a risk that persists even in relatively healthy people long after the illness has passed."
The US hasn't had a week with less than 1,000 #COVID19 deaths in four months. I really don't understand people's blasé attitude about COVID. If I were to tell you that 5 to 10 airliners would fall from the sky every week, half of the US wouldn't set foot in a plane. Yet tell people COVID remains a leading cause of death and that it is RIGHT NOW approaching the second-highest levels of the entire pandemic, and it's nothing but shrugs.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who identified a chemical tweak to messenger RNA that laid the foundation for vaccines against #Covid19, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/ Medicine.
As this photo shows, both scientists are wearing masks and NOT relying on the "vax and relax".
I've known three people who got COVID in the past two weeks. All of them posted photos of their events in the weeks leading up to their infection. Not one of them posted they had #COVID19.
I get tired of people saying "everyone's back to normal" and "I never hear of anyone sick." The social pressure for "normalcy" demands we share every crowded event and then hide our infections and illness.
If you're COVID-cautious, just realize you are not alone, no matter what your social media feeds show.
I see people, smart people, justify the argument that the latest #covid19 variants are more mild by the fact that people are getting less sick (during the acute phase). In fact, many people are completely asymptomatic.
That argument might make sense if this was a respiratory illness, such as a cold. But it's not - its vascular. It enters the body by way of the respiratory system, but it manifests itself in the bloodstream, and lives in internal organs such as the heart, brain, and others.
The respiratory symptoms people typically show are when the body recognizes the intruder and launches a counterattack to it.
The fact there is little to no immune response to an invading virus is incredibly bad.
The fact the body no longer recognizes the virus as an invader possibly is due to an impaired/rewired immune system (we know Covid damages the immune system).
It likely also means the virus is mutating to better evade the immune response (this has been documented in newer mutations).
We have constantly and consistently underestimated this virus at every turn. For some reason we want to keep wishing this thing to be nothing to worry about, instead of focusing on just how bad it could be.
Some people argue that a virus should become less dangerous to humans over time, in order to improve its chances of reproducing and growing.
There's no reason that it has to follow this route, however.
In reality, the better the virus is at disguising its damage, the better it becomes at transmitting, because we have become less likely to take steps to block it.
And there is zero reason to expect that it suddenly stopped causing long term harms ( #LongCOVID ). By it's very definition, long term effects of current variants won't be known for a while. And fundamentally, this virus has not become less dangerous.
Fun fact for people who think #COVID19 is “just the flu”:
According to the CDC, in the four weeks of July 2023 (the weeks of 7/1, 7/8, 7/15/ and 7/22, which was during what many consider a “low” or “safe” period):
Back when I was still in university, sometimes my professors appeared in news articles. More often than not, they didn't appear, but the same 2-5 others experts of the country appeared (again and again and again).
As students we asked some professors how this all came to be. Who appeared where and how? We got the following explanation:
A news outlet decides they want to create an article or video. The tone and conclusion of the piece have already been decided. Then they contact many experts in that field. For example, a query they would send out is: "Hello, we're looking for experts to talk to about X."
Not many experts respond, but some do. The query they will get in response will be something like: "Thanks for your interest, we are looking for someone to confirm that X leads to Y and Z."
My professors told me that in their naive days, they would still keep interacting and correcting and suggesting other takes. "Actually, Y and Z aren't like that, it's too simplistic, but I could talk about A and B and how it leads to maybe Y in your article."
What would happen? They were ghosted of course. 😂
Among many experts, news outlets would eventually always find one or two people willing to confirm their shitty clickbait shit. And once these experts work along, they get contacted more frequently than others. Experts who keep correcting and being difficult, aren't contacted again.
I studied in a very niche field and I know all experts in that field in my country. I started to recognize who would work along and what they would gain from it. I now know who's blacklisted and who is being kept out of the news and why.
This has been in the back of my mind during the #pandemic. I assume things work the same way among virologists, epidemiologists, and other related experts. It's frustrating because they carry the title of expert, they come across as knowledgeable and the media spreads their words everywhere. It's made to appear as if these experts represent their whole field and all others in it.
But how many experts have these news outlets had to contact before finding someone who was willing to collaborate with their minimizing?
I post a fair amount of concerning news about #COVID19, so here's some potential good news. A vaccine developed at Rutgers is showing promise for long-lasting protection from COVID, and it's cheap to produce and distribute without special low-temperature handling. It needs more testing, but perhaps better population-wide protection is on the horizon?