Re: Covid-19 Numbers
Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:09 am
So glad I read this. I am attending the March for Our Lives today with mask.
Covid was top line-of-duty death for US police for third year running in 2022
Covid was the top cause of death in the line of duty for American law enforcement for the third year in a row in 2022, according to a recent report, though the pace has slowed.
When the pandemic first hit, many law enforcement officers did what they could to lower the risks of catching Covid-19 – taking some reports over the phone rather than in person, trying to limit contact within departments and with the public.
Working on the front lines made some face-to-face contact unavoidable – and, as a result, hundreds of law enforcement officers died as Covid swept through the US. In 2020, there were at least 346 confirmed Covid deaths in the line of duty, and at least 301 work-associated deaths from Covid in 2021.
The actual mortality rate from Covid among law enforcement is assuredly higher, due to undercounting when tests were scarce and because reports like these only include line-of-duty deaths.
The total number of Covid deaths in 2022 was significantly lower than the previous two years, with 70 deaths in the line of duty, but it still outpaced all other causes of mortality on the job, according to a report from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF).
My hospital requires them and provides them if you don’t have one. They enforce it.MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:16 pm I went to the clinic last Friday to have lab tests done in preparation for seeing the doctor today. Last Friday they had a large sign out front saying that masks were required. Today... it's gone. No one - not even my doctor - was wearing a mask. I had put mine on in the car before I came in, so I left it on, but it was sort of weird.
Thanks, I need to check into that.Slim Cognito wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 8:51 am
FYI , if you missed it, the fourth booster has been approved for anyone over 65 or has a compromised immune system.
US should have attacked COVID like a foreign invasion, experts say. Have we learned any lessons?
In the absence of a federal commission on the COVID-19 pandemic, over 30 experts felt a duty to speak out and have written a book on how the US lost the pandemic war.
Despite partisan divides, pretty much everyone agrees that America's leaders made mistakes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, a group of more than 30 heavy-hitting experts from the worlds of policy, public health, science, biodefense and patient advocacy has written a book reviewing some of those errors and making suggestions for avoiding similar missteps in the future.
The book "Lessons from the COVID War," published Tuesday, is deliberate in its use of military metaphors. COVID-19 should have been attacked like a foreign invasion, but too often the nation's leaders were absent from the battlefield, they argue.
Group members held "listening sessions" with nearly 300 people, and in the absence of a federal commission on the topic, they felt a duty to speak out about what they found.
To get a deeper sense of what they found and what they believe needs to be done to prevent a repeat, USA TODAY spoke with two of the COVID Crisis Group members:
The book's primary author, Philip Zelikow, who also is the group's director and former 9/11 Commission executive director.
Dr. Mark McClellan, who ran the Food and Drug Administration and then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the George W. Bush administration.
Briefly, what's the answer to why?
Zelikow: We went into a 21st century pandemic with a 19th century system. We've come out of that pandemic essentially retaining the 19th century structure."
What do you think were some of the biggest failures of the pandemic?
McClellan: The big thing was not having systems in place, public health, health care, etc., that were well prepared for the kind of war we can fight now against new infections.
The science available to address a new pathogen like COVID has changed enormously – the ability to develop tests and treatments and vaccines at a pace never before seen in the history of pandemics. We saw heroic activities by health care organizations (and) hospitals all across the country to try to respond to the threats of infection and serious illnesses. That was a remarkable achievement of American health care.
What we were less good at was taking the steps in health care that could have prevented it. Health care and public health need to work together for an effective response in the 21st century.
We've got effective treatments now for COVID. We shouldn't still be seeing 250 deaths a day. We haven't taken those extra steps to connect those amazing biomedical capabilities to getting it to the front lines.
The waning of the pandemic led to fewer deaths in America in 2022 than in 2021, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But heart disease and cancer deaths rose, and covid-19 remained remarkably lethal, killing more than 500 people a day.
The report shows an overall drop of 5.3 percent in the death rate from all causes, a signal that the country last year had exited the worst phase of the pandemic. Deaths from covid dropped 47 percent between 2021 and 2022.
But covid has not magically become like the flu or a new type of cold. Even though the population had built up high levels of immunity from vaccination and natural infection, covid was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022, behind heart disease (699,659 deaths), cancer (607,790) and “unintentional injury,” which includes drug overdoses (218,064). The CDC estimated that covid was the underlying cause of 186,702 deaths and a contributing factor in another 58,284.
Last week when a Chinese senior health adviser projected 65 million COVID-19 cases per week in China by June, some health experts sounded the alarm.
China has been facing a new COVID-19 wave fueled by the XBB variant since April. Data from Zhong Nanshan—a respiratory disease doctor who was among the first to confirm COVID-19’s easy transmissibility—provided a rare insight into how the disease could possibly be spreading in China almost six months after Beijing abruptly ended its draconian zero-COVID strategy.
Since pivoting to “living with the virus” policy from early December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped updating weekly infections. But the sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols also led to an estimated 37 million new infections a day weeks later. By January, experts said they believed almost 80% of China’s 1.4 billion population had already been infected in this first wave.
For the second wave since April, Zhong’s modeling revealed that the XBB variant is expected to cause 40 million infections weekly by May, going up to 65 million in June. This goes against the grain of Chinese health officials’ estimate that the wave had peaked in April. In Beijing, the number of new infections recorded between May 15 and 21 grew four times in four weeks.
Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, were present in the blood of 96.4% of Americans over the age of 16 by September 2022. That’s according to a serosurvey – an analysis testing for the presence of these immune defense molecules – conducted on samples from blood donors.
A serosurvey like this one helps researchers estimate how many people have been exposed to any part of the coronavirus, whether via vaccination or infection. Both can trigger the generation of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. And by identifying which kind of antibodies someone has in their blood, researchers can break down the 96.4% into different types of immunity: infection-derived, vaccine-derived and hybrid.
COVID-19 vaccines used in the United States are based on only one part of the virus – the spike, or S, protein. Researchers can tell that a person has been vaccinated and has not been infected if their blood has only anti-S antibodies that target that spike protein. If someone has anti-N antibodies, which target the virus’s nucleocapsid protein, it’s a sign that they’ve been infected by SARS-CoV-2. To reliably identify someone with hybrid immunity, a researcher would need to match someone who has anti-N antibodies to an official vaccination database.
What about the 3.6% without antibodies?
Immunologists know that antibody levels decrease in the months after a COVID-19 infection or vaccination, and this is true for many pathogens. It’s possible some people did have antibodies at one point, but they’re no longer detectable. And not every infection leads to a detectable antibody response, particularly if the case was mild or asymptomatic.
Another factor is the accuracy of the antibody test. No test is perfect, so a small percentage of people who truly have antibodies might come up negative.
Together, these considerations mean that the 96.4% number is likely an underestimate. It seems reasonable to conclude that almost no one in this population has neither been infected by SARS-CoV-2 nor received a COVID-19 vaccine.