What Is Happening With Covid?

What is happening with Covid?

The good news is that Covid does not dominate the news cycle everyday as it did for the last two years.

Part of that is due to the Ukraine war but the overall decline in cases since the Winter surge and more people accepting the fact that they need to find a way to live with Covid have also contributed to that trend.

However, that also means that fewer people really are up to date on what the Covid landscape looks like right now.

I thought I would provide some perspectives based on what I have been seeing.

Everyone is probably aware about a federal judge ruling that the CDC exceeded its authority in extending the mask mandate on airline travel. 

This was good news for the airlines and most air travelers.

It was not received well by Biden's chief Covid advisor.

Others argued that a federal judge should not have such power.

However, what about the power that unelected bureaucrats had at the CDC for over two years?

There is an argument that in a public health emergency bureaucrats should be able to bypass the legislative process for a limited time.

However, we are over two years into this "emergency".

If there is a mandate it should come from Congress. We are beyond the use of emergency powers.

As for Dr. Jha's comment. It is laughable.

He said that CDC scientists had "asked for 15 days to make a more data-driven durable decision" and the judge should have allowed it.

What has the CDC been doing for the last two years? They have had two years and have yet to provide any data on the effectiveness of masks on airplanes or anywhere else.

This is the best rationale he could give that the mandate should continue? 

Let's look at other facts about Covid that have not gotten as much attention.

Cases in the United States dropped dramatically after the Winter surge.

There was a 97% decrease in new cases between January 15 and April 4.

The last two weeks has seen a small increase but those cases are generally being seen in states in the Northeast.

Interestingly, all of the states that are seeing the largest increase in cases right now are among the most highly vaccinated states.

Source: The New York Times

Heavily vaccinated and mandated Canada is also seeing a spike in cases right now.

Cases per capita are three times higher in Canada as in the United States.

This may be explained by seasonal factors as Canada also saw a surge last April. However, cases are still 50% higher this year than they were at the same time last year despite 86% of all those age 5 and older being fully vaccinated and 57% of those eligible having been boosted.

The Asia Pacific area is also seeing a lot of cases.

For context, at the peak of cases in the United States there were 2,400 cases/per million.

Right now the United States has about 100 cases per million.

Australia.

Australia peaked at more than 4,000 cases/million per day and is averaging around 1,800/million per day right now.

That is 18x the level in the U.S. right now.

New Zealand.

16x the level of the U.S. currently.

South Korea.

27x the U.S. level.

Hong Kong.

Hong Kong peaked on March 4 at 3.5 times the peak the United States had in January. Cases dropped dramatically but they are still twice the per capita rate in the U.S. right now.

What is interesting in all of these countries is that the cases seemed to skyrocket at the same time that booster doses were rolled out and administered to large portions of the population.

Is that a coincidence? Perhaps. What if it isn't?

Of course, no one really knows what is going on in China.

It appears to be dealing with a major Covid outbreak.

370 million (about one-fourth of China's population) is under some form of lockdown.

Source: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/04/cd2370fa196d-370-mil-people-under-some-form-of-lockdown-in-china-due-to-covid.html

Shanghai's 26 million residents have been locked down since late March. Many people are hungry and dispirited. There seems to be little question that more have died from the lockdowns than the virus.

Commercial activity has almost ceased including shipments from the largest port in the world. The area where lockdowns are in effect represents about 80% of China's GDP.

Why is China doing this?

Is it just an authoritarian action because the Chinese Communists refuse to admit to their citizens that they cannot control everything?

Is there something about the virus that the Chinese know that nobody else does?

Are the Chinese just using the Covid outbreak to further sow chaos on the world's supply chain?

We will likely see the effects in the United States in a couple of months when all of the stuff that was supposed to be delivered in those shipping containers does not show up.

Source: https://twitter.com/KOMUnews/status/1515993580946472961

What is next with Covid?

I recently came across data that Walgreen's is publishing on all of the Covid tests it administers in its stores across the United States. The data looks back over the previous seven days.

What is interesting in looking at the data is that the unvaccinated have a lower positivity rate for the virus than those who are vaccinated.

In fact, it is not even close.

Source: https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.jsp

Does this indicate that the vaccines are suppressing the innate immunity system such that those vaccinated are actually more susceptible to the virus?

I don't know.

It could be that those who are unvaccinated are having to get tested just to engage in activities that vaccinated people do not have to. This might mean that the unvaccinated are healthier to begin with when they get tested. This then skews the results.

However, it is food for thought especially when you look at the charts above in those heavily vaccinated and boosted countries.

Geert Vanden Bossche (I have cited his work previously in these pages here and here) believes that the virus is continuing to mutate as it is put under immune pressure by the large number of people who have been vaccinated.

He argues that it is just a matter of time before there is a variant that is more contagious and more virulent than Omicron. 

He also believes that those who have had the most doses of the vaccine will be most vulnerable to the virus at that point because their innate immune system will have been compromised.

I have stated before that I hope Vanden Bossche is dead wrong. However, his views and predictions on where Covid is going over the last year have matched the data better than anyone else I have followed on the subject. He strongly condemned the mass vaccination approach at the time the vaccines were first rolled out and argued they would lead to more variants and more infections. He has been correct thus far on that score.

On the other hand, I have seen another view ("Eugyppius" on Substack) that believes that the virus has run its course as a significant threat.

He cites German data that tracks all Acute Respiratory Infections going back to 2017/18.

That data shows that there has been nothing abnormal about anything that has occurred in this "pandemic" compared to other years with acute numbers of respiratory infections. In fact, the last year with Omicron has been below normal.

Source: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/sars-2-isnt-doing-much-of-anything?s=r

What does he make of this and what does it mean for the future?

More than that, you can see here what a complete nothingburger the entire Omicron wave has been. Despite all the screeching headlines. Germans spent the latest SARS-2 wave on balance healthier than in the pre-pandemic era. If it weren’t for all the pointless quarantining, nobody would’ve noticed that anything was amiss.

He does believe that the vaccinated have more risk of infection but he rejects the doom and gloom predictions of Vanden Bossche and others.

Our primary obligations must be to the truth, and right now, the truth is this: The vaccinated suffer some degree of immune imprinting, and Omicron replicates preferentially in their lungs. That is not great, but we’re not seeing higher levels of death, hospitalisation or sickness right now. Corona has become a bad cold, and the default assumption must be that it stays that way. We don’t lose sleep over the possibility that some terrifying new hCoV-OC43 variant will emerge to bring back the mortality of 1889. The murky laboratory origins of SARS-2, and the limited evidence of tinkering that its genome bears, aren’t enough to support eternal predictions of death and doom.

Like most everything about Covid from the beginning, I am sure we are in for more surprises

My most fervent hope is that the last prediction is correct and this will all soon be a distant memory for us all.