Pandemicia coronavirus report #69
Epidemic
Enough to make you a socialist
We continue to watch the pandemic unfold, 32 months from its inception, and we continue to watch the inconsistency and lack of planning that has surrounded the disease since its inception. Virtually all mandates have been removed in Australia, it is no longer even necessary to report cases or to stay isolated, except for workers in hospitals and aged care.
Friends in Europe report:
People seem to have
forgotten that COVID is well and truly will with us. I was in Spain and
Croatia for 3 weeks last week. One friend caught it on way over, I caught it on
way home. The amount of coughing everywhere-the whole of Europe is walking
around with it
and another
the symptoms are so
mild that they no longer test.
The complete panic that surrounded the first year has been replaced by complaisance. Yet Covid has not changed, although treatments for severe Covid have improved and case mortality is less than a third of what it was.
One could be forgiven for taking the cynical view that all Western countries handed over their hopes for handling the pandemic to the drug giants, and once the billions had been made and some improvements in treatment had emerged, they all lost interest
Only two significant countries have not changed their approach since the beginning - Brazil under Bolsonaro on the laissez faire right wing of politics, and China on the left. Brazil has had 3,202 deaths per million in total since the start of the epidemic (about the same as the USA) while China has had 3.6 per million, about a thousandth of that level.
If China, where the epidemic was first noticed, had followed the path of Brazil or the USA, they would have had over 4.5 million deaths, which would have been about 40% of the world's total.
Global report
There have been 619 million cases, up 40 million from our last report two months ago. Cases per week are less than half of last report, but still exceeding that of any week up to November 2020. Global deaths are about 10,000 a week.
Cases are rising in Europe as the cold weather arrives, up about 30% in Western Europe. In Australia cases are at their lowest level of 2022, but considerably exceeding levels of 2020 or 2021.
Nowhere seems to have a really bad outbreak compared with early 2022.
Deaths
The total number of deaths is now about 6,550,000. The USA has had about 1,060,000 of these and Brazil about 686,000,
Late starter Bulgaria has possibly had the worst epidemic, with 9600 per million excess deaths and 5477 confirmed Covid deaths. Peru has had 6424 deaths per million. Australia has had 587 deaths per million, about a fifth that of - but it still compares poorly with 385 per million in India, a country where the disease was supposed to be out of control.
The high levels of mortality recorded throughout the developed world still remain a mystery, but it seems most likely due to modern medicine keeping people alive way past what nature intended (which applies to the author).
Response
The bivalent booster, which is preventative against the omicron variants, has only been provided to 1.5% of Americans so far.
The vaccine rollout in the USA has been shown to be very uneven. Many black and Latino communities
did not receive first round vaccine doses. It took till the end of 2021 for distribution to become equitable.
More than 200,000 studies have been published, which is four times more than the number of research papers written on the flu in the past century. However there are still many mysteries.
Major cruise lines are dropping their vaccine requirements.
The Covid dashboard creator Lauren Gardner has won the coveted Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award. She has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. She is an expert in network modeling who specializes in modeling the risk of infectious disease. Somehow she managed to create the mapping tool in January 2020, before the disease had officially arrived in Europe or the USA. It is all the more astonishing given that it required the cooperation of ESRI, CDC, WHO and all the governments of the world in record time. Gardner now has a large number of modelling grants.
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