Thursday Reads

In a Deep Dark December, by Stephen Keller

Good Afternoon!!

We can soon bid farewell to 2021. The past two years have been awful, thanks to Trump and Covid-19. Will 2022 be any better? We can only hope. For now, the new Omicron variant is infecting more people than ever before.

The New York Times: The U.S. breaks its single-day case record, nearly doubling the highest numbers from last winter.

With a caseload nearly twice that of the worst days last winter, the United States shattered its record for new daily coronavirus cases, a milestone that may not adequately illustrate the rapid spread of the Delta and Omicron variants because testing has slowed over the holidays.

As a second year of living with the pandemic was drawing to a close, the new daily case total topped 488,000 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database. (The total was higher on Monday, but that number should not be considered a record because it included data from the long holiday weekend.)

Wednesday’s seven-day average of new daily cases, 301,000, was also a record, compared with 267,000 the day before, according to the database. In the past week, more than two million cases have been reported nationally, and 15 states and territories reported more cases than in any other seven-day period.

The rise in cases has been driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant, which became dominant in the United States as of last week. So far, however, those increased cases have not resulted in more severe disease, as hospitalizations have increased only 11 percent and deaths have decreased slightly in the past two weeks.

Because Covid tests have been in short supply over the holidays, Wednesday’s numbers still may not fully illustrate the havoc caused by the two variants, which have sent caseloads soaring and have worsened a labor shortage, upending the hospitality, medical and travel industries, among others.

December, by Hans Baluschek

Demand for tests has outstripped supply, particularly in the last month as the Omicron variant has spread at an astonishing speed. And the holiday season offers its own disruptions to the U.S. case curve, with many testing sites offering limited hours and labs and government offices not open to report test results.

Last year, the national case curve showed pronounced declines after Thanksgiving and Christmas that did not reflect real decreases in new infections. The impact of holidays may be even more noticeable this time around, as illustrated by the Labor Day holiday in September, because states are reporting data less consistently than they did a year ago.

Head over to the NYT if you want more details.

Massachusetts is one of the most highly vaccinated states, but case numbers here are hitting record highs. CBS Boston: Massachusetts Reports New Single Day Record Of 15,163 COVID Cases, Positivity Rate Also Hits New High.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported 15,163 new confirmed COVID cases on Wednesday, a new single day record. The previous record was set last week when the state reported 10,040 new cases on Christmas Eve.

As of Wednesday, the seven-day weighted average of positive tests in Massachusetts had also increased to 13.58%, also a new record high.

There were also 45 additional deaths reported Wednesday.

Health officials said the total number of confirmed cases in the state is now 1,017,429. The total number of confirmed deaths is now 19,737.

There were 91,974 total new tests reported.

There are 1,711 people currently hospitalized for a coronavirus-related illness.

There are also 392 patients currently in intensive care.

Governor Baker plans to speak about the crisis later today. It’s happening everywhere.

According to an expert quoted in this article at The Washington Post, most people are probably going to get the virus eventually. We just have to hope the vaccinations protect us from serious illness and death.

Across the nation and the world, people who thought they knew how to avoid covid are getting a rude surprise. Safety precautions that had for so long felt talismanic ― get vaccinated, mask up, avoid large indoor gatherings — have in the past week or two collapsed under the weight of omicron, a much more highly transmissible variant than the ones before it.

Dark December Day, Eileen Ziegler

Schools and colleges returned to virtual learning. Flights were canceled as airline staff caught the virus. Long-anticipated holiday plans fell apart as people — young and old, vaccinated and unvaccinated — tested positive right and left. Those with negative tests worried it was only a matter of time.

They are likely right, according to Robert Frenck, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Research Center at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “You know what? You’re probably going to get covid,” he said, but if you have been vaccinated you are unlikely to become seriously ill.

Instead of thinking they lost the race against the virus, Frenck encouraged people to redefine their concept of winning. “It’s not that you failed,” he said. “You actually succeeded. You dodged the bullet. … What are people trying to prevent? Are we trying to prevent the common cold? Nobody’s going to do that. You’ve gotten your booster, you’ve done everything, and you still get covid, but how sick did you get?”

For most infected people with vaccines, he said, “What they’re having is a cold.”

People misunderstand what the vaccine is designed to do, Frenck said, adding that unvaccinated people are dying at a rate 20 times higher than people who are vaccinated and boosted. “Vaccines are going to stop people from being hospitalized and from ending up in the ICU and from dying,” he said. “This is nature saying, it hasn’t gone away now, and we need to go out and get vaccinated.”

Vaccinated people are dying from breakthrough cases though. Here are the latest numbers from Massachusetts: 20,247 New Breakthrough Cases in Mass., 70 More Deaths in Vaccinated People.

Massachusetts health officials on Tuesday reported more than 20,000 new breakthrough COVID cases over the past week and 70 more deaths.

In the last week, 20,247 new breakthrough cases — infections in people who have been vaccinated — were reported, with 353 more vaccinated people hospitalized, Massachusetts Department of Public Health officials said Tuesday. It’s a 45% increase in the rate of new breakthrough cases in Massachusetts — last week saw 13,919 new COVID infections in vaccinated people — but a decrease in the number of deaths among vaccinated people.

The new report brings the total number of breakthrough cases to 134,565, and the death toll among people with breakthrough infections to 854.

Both figures remain a tiny percentage of the total number of all people who have been vaccinated.

Yes, the numbers are relatively small, but I wonder how many people who died are in my elderly age group?

The Washington Post reports that Coronavirus risk calculations get harder as a study suggests rapid tests may be less effective at detecting omicron.

As the coronavirus spawns a record-breaking wave of infections, new research suggests that rapid tests widely used to identify potential covid-19 cases might be less effective at identifying illness caused by the swiftly spreading omicron variant.

Country Lane in Winter, by Stuart Black

The finding is the latest complication for anyone trying to strike a common-sense balance between being vigilant and returning to normalcy as the country approaches the third year of the pandemic.

The research, issued Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration and produced by the National Institutes of Health, said the rapid antigen tests — which have been in high demand and often hard to find this holiday season — “do detect the omicron variant but may have reduced sensitivity.”

Although rapid tests showed reduced sensitivity to omicron compared with earlier variants in a lab study, the real-world implications are not clear and are still under investigation, said Bruce J. Tromberg, director of NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and lead of RADx Tech, an effort to assess and speed up the development of tests in cooperation with the FDA. The findings do not necessarily mean the tests will be less sensitive in the real world.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Merry Christmas!

Good Afternoon!

I hope you are all having a nice holiday weekend! I’m home alone today, because I want to avoid any chance of getting the highly contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19. I’ve been hanging out here, mostly reading and and talking to friends and family on the phone.

Yesterday I read a very strange and interesting article on the origins of the Santa Claus folklore. Check it out if you have time today. Thom Hartmann at Raw Story: The hidden shamanic history of Santa Claus.

When Louise and I lived in Germany, Herr Mueller led us up a mountainside deep into the Franconian forest on this night where they had covered a pine tree with candles: we sang carols and he read aloud a bible verse. He later told me that in ancient times the shamans would set the tallest tree afire to re-ignite the sun and bring back longer days.

Arctic shamans, around this time of the year, would leave batches of dried amanita mushrooms out in the snow for the hungry reindeer, then follow them as they danced and played, gathering the fresh yellow snow to make into a holiday grog.For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.

The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.

Their reindeer livers metabolize and thus neutralize the compounds that poison humans, but leave the psychedelic Muscimol largely untouched. Thus, reindeer urine on fresh snow is powerfully psychedelic.

The shamans then collected the “yellow snow” and used it to get high.

This was also the time of the year that the father of gods in Norse religion, the long-white-bearded Odin, would ride his eight-legged horse Sleipnir (“sleigh-nir”), bringing good people small gifts made by “Odin’s men” in Asgard, his arctic retreat. The story seems to have morphed as it traveled out of Norway from men to elves, and from eight legs to eight reindeer.

Shamans and their communities would light their pine trees with candles, put the north star (the axis around which the world revolves) atop their trees, and consume their yellow-snow drinks on the darkest nights.Odin controlled the powers of Thunder and Lightning, “Donner” and “Blitzen” in ancient Norse and today’s Germanic and Scandinavian languages.

The reindeer’s favorite food, the amanita mushrooms, look like the shamans dressed, red with white trim and white spots. They’re rotund: you could call them “chubby.”

They grow under pine trees because their mycorrhizae or fungal filaments that extend underground transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by transporting carbohydrates from year-round photosynthesis in their needles back down through their roots into the mycorrhizae to nourish the mushrooms.

Amanitas are only found under pine and spruce trees because of this symbiotic relationship that keeps them both healthy. And to this day pine and spruce are pretty much the only trees we use to decorate our homes this time of year.

This yule time history was completely new to me.

Omicron is spoiling holiday celebrations for many people.

CNN Business: More than 5,000 flights canceled on Christmas weekend.

Thursday Reads: Omicron Blues

Good Afternoon!!

The latest scientific speculation on the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is that the disease will eventually become endemic like the flu and common cold. We’re not going to get rid of it; we’ll just have to learn to live (or die) with it. We will have to get regular vaccines and new anti-viral treatments will likely be developed. 

From today’s Wall Street Journal and not paywalled: Covid-19 Marches Toward Endemic Status in U.S. as Omicron Spreads.

The Omicron variant’s aggressive advance is the latest twist in the course of a disease that public-health experts say is on a path toward becoming endemic in the U.S.

In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic won’t have an end date. Rather, a crisis that engulfed the world within months of the coronavirus’s discovery in China will dissipate in fits and starts into something that feels more like normal over the course of years, infectious-disease experts say.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a day where the whole thing feels over,” said Joshua Schiffer, an associate professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

How quickly an endemic, steady-state arrives and how disruptive the virus remains will depend on what level of disease officials and individuals decide to tolerate, the precautions they are willing to adopt, and how the virus evolves.

What will that look like?

“We know we have all the tools to use so that we can continue operations that are important, like keeping kids in school,” said Charity Dean, former assistant director of the California Department of Public Health and co-founder of the Public Health Company Group Inc. “We just need to be proactive and put them in place right now.”

New antiviral treatments from Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc. are also expected to help lessen Covid-19’s burden on society. On the outlook for vaccines, early lab testing indicates a third or booster dose of the vaccines from Moderna Inc. and from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE could protect against Omicron. Testing and public-health monitoring are also critical.

“Once we have those really well integrated, we are ready to move to where Covid is no longer disrupting our society,” said Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Even then, Covid-19 and its effects won’t be gone. Physical therapist Noah Greenspan opened a rehabilitation clinic in New York City on Monday for patients with lingering Covid-19 symptoms, or long Covid. He had provided online services and a smaller, temporary clinic since October 2020.

“We are planning as if Covid will never go away,” Dr. Greenspan said.

One problem is that immunity from Covid-19 doesn’t last as long as that from colds and flu, so we might have to have more frequent shots. I wonder if the anti-vax crazies would continue to muck it all up though.

Israel is rolling out more booster shots.

From the Washington Post article:

In the U.S., only a small percentage of people have gotten the booster. CNBC: U.S. heads into second Christmas with Covid as cases rise and Americans rush to get booster shots.

More than 62 million Americans have received a booster as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, representing roughly 19% of all Americans and 30% of those who are fully vaccinated. About 55% of fully vaccinated seniors have received an additional dose.

Since the heavily mutated and highly contagious Covid variant was first confirmed in the U.S. on Dec. 1, the nation has seen some of its biggest daily surges in vaccine shots in months. Much of the increase has been driven by boosters, which are being administered more than first and second doses, combined, at an average of more than 800,000 per day over the week ended Dec. 16, according to federal data.

“It’s got over 50 mutations, and because of those mutations just being vaccinated with two doses may not be enough,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” on Monday. “And so we really do need people to get boosted in order to increase their protection, especially against severe disease and death with omicron.”

I really hate to post this . . .

https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1473758973778173955?s=20

WaPo: “Gregg Gonsalves is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and associate professor (adjunct) at Yale Law School. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.” [He is also a long-time activist in the fight against AIDS.]

I’ve lived through two pandemics in my lifetime, first AIDS and now covid-19. From those experiences, I know no one roots for our leaders’ failures in such crises. Their successes can be measured in lives saved.

That’s why it pains me to admit it: President Biden is failing on covid-19.

After weeks of urging by public health and medical experts, Biden spoke to the public on Tuesday about his plan to address the omicron variant, which has swept the world in just a few weeks. Many of us have been asking for a policy “reset” to ramp up U.S. efforts as cases mount across the country. We hoped this would be the moment.

Sadly, what we saw this week was an administration floundering and a president not in command of facts or willing to shift course in any substantial way on the pandemic.

The president’s main call was for Americans to get vaccinated. That’s a fine refrain, except we still have millions without a single jab. The president was eager to point out that under his watch, 200 million people were fully vaccinated — except we know now that we require boosters to protect against omicron and only about 60 million Americans have had that additional jab.

Biden did indeed urge people to get boosted, saying they were free and available, but except for announcing a set of pop-up clinics around the United States, he didn’t articulate the plan to get this done. As for vaccine misinformation, he told its purveyors to “stop it,” which is far from the campaign we need to address the anti-vaccine propaganda circulating widely in the United States and the corporate reticence to take vaccination seriously.

We already know vaccines alone will not solve this problem. The president made a bet in March that vaccination could return the country to some semblance of normalcy, promising a “summer of freedom.” But as the delta variant emerged, the highly transmissible strain tore through the country, outpacing the speed of our vaccination efforts.

Public health experts called for more emphasis on a wider range of interventions, including rapid testing, masking and environmental controls, such as the upgrading of ventilation systems in buildings across the country. Yet such measures remain underutilized here in the United States. White House press secretary Jen Psaki even scorned those who suggested making rapid testing more widely available, dressing down an NPR reporter who made a suggestion of sending tests to every American household.

To its credit, the administration has since announced it would begin to send 500 million rapid tests to Americans in January, although it’s not clear whether the administration has put in an order for such tests. And at the scale promised, every American would receive a one-time delivery of no more than a single test at some point this winter. The president also claimed that schools need to be open and they are safer than ever, pointing out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now endorsed a “test and stay” strategy to make this possible. Except, the infrastructure and resources to carry out that strategy are simply not there for many school districts.

The shortage of tests comes as Americans want to know whether they are infected during the holiday season. Credit…Saul Martinez for The New York Times

In fact, the administration has not ordered the tests yet. The New York Times: Biden Promised 500 Million Tests, but Americans Will Have to Wait.

President Biden promised Americans he is making 500 million coronavirus tests available free of charge, but help is at least weeks away — if not longer — for anxious Americans facing a surge of new virus cases.

Mr. Biden’s administration has not yet signed a contract to buy the tests, and the website to order them will not be up until January. Officials have not said how many tests people will be able to order or how quickly they will be shipped once they begin to be available next month. Manufacturers say they are already producing tests as fast as they can.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden excoriated the lack of testing during the Trump administration, saying in March 2020 that “the administration’s failure on testing is colossal, and it’s a failure of planning, leadership and execution.” But the Omicron variant caught the White House off guard, as the president has acknowledged, and cases have far outstripped the government’s ability to make tests available.

The president’s pledge of a half-billion tests on Tuesday was the centerpiece of a newly aggressive testing effort, announced just days before Christmas, as Americans try to find the hard-to-find tests so they know whether they are infected during the holiday season.

“That’s not a plan — it’s a hope,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which tracks testing trends. “If those tests came in January and February, that could have an impact, but if they are spread out over 10 to 12 months, I’m not sure what kind of impact it is going to have.”

Contracts to purchase tests could be finalized as soon as next week, officials said.

Whether testing manufacturers can now ramp up to produce an extra 500 million at-home tests — and how soon — is unclear. John M. Koval, a spokesman for Abbott Laboratories, a major manufacturer of rapid at-home antigen tests, said in an email message that the company is seeing “unprecedented demand” for its tests, “and we’re sending them out as fast as we can make them.”

More News stories to check out:

Helaine Olen at The Washington Post: Stop shaming people for getting covid. Blame belongs elsewhere.

Vice News: People Got Sick at a Conspiracy Conference. They’re Sure It’s Anthrax. [It’s Covid.]

CNN: Biden says he supports filibuster carve-out for voting rights.

AP News: He wore a wire, risked his life to expose who was in the KKK. [He learned that many members of the KKK were in law enforcement.]

Lawrence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer, and Dennis Aftergut at The New York Times: Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection?

The Daily Beast: The Obscure Charge Jan. 6 Investigators Are Looking at for Trump.

Just Security: The Path to Real Accountability: The Timetable and Track Record of the Jan. 6 Select Committee.

The Washington Post: Amid fears Russia will invade Ukraine, Putin points finger at U.S. and NATO in marathon news conference.

What’s on your mind today? Any good news you’d like to share?