I’ve been looking at numbers round the world as part of my daily Covid case check routine of late.
South Africa of interest given that it’s the first to deal with Omicron.
Cases there peaked on 17th December but deaths continue to rise today, quite steeply too. Trying to establish whether this is the lag between deaths and cases which doesn’t quite look right to me or if it’s cases not being identified and they actually haven’t peaked at all.
I think in much of the world, you can just forget case numbers. Testing establishments simply haven’t been able to keep up. If you look at Ontario data, it appears as if we peaked about 10 days ago. But that is simply an artefact of very poor government preparation - we haven’t even been able to meet the 100k/day test output we had last April. Access to testing has been shut down for all but essential workers, vulnerable populations and direct hospital use - and the processing time has kicked out to a truly useless 10 days. We are probably in the bottom quartile for performance, but similar stories can be found all over the world.
South Africa probably has peaked, but not necessarily when their test data says they did. It is just very hard to produce a curve that reaches a peak in ~ 35 days with what we know about Omicron, contagious as it is, that would be stunningly quick. As a guess, I would think the actual peak was probably 4-5 days ago. As testing limits kick, one of the expected outcomes is that the average identified case becomes more serious, as people with minor symptoms just don’t go through the effort. Deaths have something like a 10 day lag, but with something like a Weibull distribution, a long tail that can go out to 30 days and still have a measurable portion of the population.
it’s a bit of a numbers game, no pun intended. according to a report the Canadian Government put out last year, a huge percentage of reported Covid Deaths has co-morbidities and the number of deaths recorded of healthy people under the age of 65 was only 4% of the total death count. note that this page is linked through archive.org as the Canadian government has most of their data offline due to “hacking”…
Dementia or Alzheimer’s are the most common comorbidities associated
with COVID-19 deaths
Of the over 9,500 COVID-involved deaths between March and July, the majority (90%) had at least one other
cause, condition or complication reported on the certificate.
Dementia or Alzheimer’s were listed on the death certificate of 42% of the women and one-third of the men (33%)
in COVID-involved deaths. (Chart 1). These results can be explained by the age profile of Canadians whose deaths
involved COVID-19 over this period (54% were 85 years or older), as well as by their over-representation in longterm health care facilities. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, about 1 in 4 Canadians aged 85 or
older live with dementia or Alzheimer’s.3 Moreover, more than half of seniors aged 80 or older who reside in longterm health care facilities live with dementia.4 During the first wave of the pandemic and up to the end of May, longterm care facilities and retirement homes accounted for more than 80% of all COVID-19 deaths in the country.5
So, if you applied that model to the UK number…6000 people?
The school conversation in this country is wild. It’s often been an area where motivated reasoning is at its most intense (if you dont “believe in covid”, or you need schools to be open you demand they must be opened regardless of the safety or ability of schools to operate). This past few weeks though in this environment of so many formerly covid conscious people wanting to act like the pandemic is over, it feels like it’s got worse.
Ah thanks I’m guilty of subconsciously assuming testing is absolute and equal everywhere when clearly it isn’t.
Worth noting the UK figures are suggesting it may have peaked but we’ll see in a week or so. The rate of rise in figures across Europe is staggering. It makes all other waves look like minor bumps, logarithmic scale aside.
UK performance on testing is about as good as it gets, over the course of the pandemic it is nearly 5.5 tests per citizen. Substantially more than four times our rate here. But even that obscures a key point - in Canada we are flying blind now, our best indicators for the actual prevalence are wastewater and hospitalization. We are seeing positivity rates like 30%.
The UK is performing over 10x (closer to 15x, in fact) the number of tests per day that we are, despite a population just 75% bigger. So your data is probably reasonably robust, although likely still an understatement. Ours is now just garbage, there is no point in even looking at our charts.
5 countries with a large percentage of elderly population, I’d be willing to bet that a large number of those deaths are those elderly demographic which weren’t isolated well enough from covid exposure to protect them before they could be vaccinated
Texas mother allegedly put son in trunk of car to avoid being exposed to Covid-19
Yes and I’m guilty of looking at the charts assuming that all other nations are at a similar level.
Basically the UK Omicron curve might be the one to watch. Let’s see how sharp a peak we get.
Interesting read, this. Goes along with other thoughts I have had while mulling this situation over. I have had Covid, and two subsequent vax shots. Both vax shots were over a year after I got sick and I had zero reaction to it other than a sore spot in my shoulder for a day… That tells me, my body knew what it was and fought it off before it escalated in my body. I have developed an immunity in my system to this virus through repeated exposure. Even if my antibodies drop off, why do I need a booster? The virus has mutated, so if I get a booster wouldn’t it need to be a different type? If Delta efficacy dropped to 60% or less with some vaccines, why do I need to bother with another of the same? Why do any of us?
exactly my point. The body doesn’t “need” antibodies to fight of the virus, that’s what our immune system is for.
Our body needs to be able to recognize the virus and deal with it. Antibodies are a result of our immune system doing its job. So, once we’ve been vaccinated why do we need boosters? This whole thing is starting to stink.
Because the body forgets for some reason.
do you believe that’s correct? because I don’t. there’s a dropoff in antibodies at 6-9months after infection which is normal, but that doesn’t mean your body’s immune system doesn’t know how to deal with it. maybe for those who are immuno-compromised, or the elderly. but for a large percentage of the population that’s not necessarily the case. We should be concentrating efforts now on areas of the world that haven’t had any opportunity to vaccinate at all and see if that stops these mutations…
Interesting project Veritas information coming out in regards to DARPA
@Semmy I understand where you are coming from, but your last few posts are filled with misunderstandings of the basic science. You can only come to the right conclusions by accident if its premised on the wrong facts.
Vaccination of new populations at this stage is almost pointless. We cannot possibly reach even a relevant percentage of unvaccinated populations globally, vaccination is now just a tool to improve outcomes for wealthy countries. There is even an argument against increasing the likelihood of a breakthrough mutation by increasing the percentage of a ‘mixed’ population. Omicron’s vaccination breakthrough is already huge, so the more vaccinated people it is able to infect, the higher the risk of a nastier variant.
Morally, though, that creates one hell of a problem, because we know mortality outcomes are so much better for vaccinated populations.
refer to the link I posted an 10hr ago from Globe and Mail, dated 5 days ago. excerpt at the bottom of it:
Dr. Bruce Mazer, an immunologist and associate scientific director of the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, said that even with waning levels of antibodies in the blood, the body’s immune system has a cellular memory of a virus and can mobilize to fight it. He said people who have been vaccinated, have had the virus, or both, generate cellular immunity.
“Other parts of the immune system are waiting and act as sentries,” he said. “You have T-cell memory which helps fight the virus and B-cell memory that helps to make fresh groups of antibodies.”
The McGill professor said the task force is currently studying this backup immune response, as well as the immune response to the Omicron variant which he said has 50 mutations, compared to the original COVID-19 virus.
that’s a can of worms I’m not sure society is ready for. the reprecussions of proof that sections of the US government tasked to protect the population are the ones who unleashed this…
