Vermont’s numbers seem like they are slowly ticking back up.
Hospitalizations have doubled in the past week (though still a fifth of what they were during the mid-January peak). ICU numbers jumped from zero to 5 in the past two days.
Today was our second straight day of 200+ cases. Last time that happened was February 23-24.
is that elon and grimes’ omen offspring?
nationwide, covid hospitalizations are at an all time low today since the initial bump, which is cool I guess.
Czech Republic’s doing fine against COVID as of now. Cases have been working their way downwards since the beginning of February. Barely makes the news anymore.
Only 5 EU countries have lower number of new cases per capita over the last week (Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland).
Bill Gates 5G nanobots are officially in.
The Day After. Surprisingly, not a single after effect as of yet.
Same for a day after my 2nd booster, except for a welt on my arm. Apparently the invaders have been stopped there.
So it looks like they updated this data (weekly update?) shortly after I posted, and there’s a more noticeable uptick in wastewater. So we should expect to see official cases bouncing up shortly:
The other thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how bad a job we(?) are doing monitoring actual cases. I feel like we should have a significant amount of randomized surveillance testing if we really want to be able to track spread and variants on an ongoing basis, rather than waiting for those cases to turn up as hospitalizations or deaths.
Like, at my school, we have this huge testing infrastructure, which is free and easy to participate in. It’s in a large recreation center, and has the capacity for around 60-80 people to test (i.e., stand there and spit in test tubes) at a time. Since it only takes a couple of minutes to do this, the capacity is several hundred people an hour. (I don’t know the capacity of the lab, though.) I get tested once a week and have results back within 24 hours. The last several times I’ve been there, the collection area has been a ghost town, with maybe 5 people there at all. It would be incredibly useful to know in real time whether cases are picking up, but there doesn’t seem to be any effort to capture this data.
Oh, I meant to say that I that your conclusions about wastewater seem sound to me, and they track with what we know about testing: at the start, there weren’t enough tests. Then we had centralized testing in adequate supply, but by the delta and especially omicron waves, at home testing was abundant, so we started undercounting again. So, yeah, looks like it’s happening.
Protocols get relaxed, then there is more spread. It looks like there were small blips after the first and second waves, so I think both scenarios are feasible—a mild bump reflecting the new (or lack) of policy or it could the start of a new wave.
I’m hoping for mild and a return to open windows to keep it that way.
Flying today. I really hope they keep the mask rules in place for airports and planes.
“We” don’t.
Had my first Covid case in two weeks last night
There is just no appetite for any restrictions at anything beyond an individual level at this point. Gonna be wild if this thing takes off.
The experience in Ontario right now is pretty weird and perhaps instructive. Our loosening of restrictions is causing a pretty big surge in cases but so far the uptick in severe outcomes (hospitalization, ICU, death) has been modest. If (big if) that persists then it’s definitely a silver lining surge. A lot of the debate in Ontario right now seems to be more about the optics / politics instead of the actual outcome which is too bad. We should be rallying around the possibility that we are moving toward waves with a lot of modest cases and a number of severe cases that the healthcare system can absorb, which is pretty much the optimal outcome. But the health care workers are completely beaten down now so it’s really tough for them to react in any way other than “here we go again the government is throwing us under the bus”.
I’m actually surprised that the numbers for masking mandates are that high. Figured most would be against them by now.
Dammit. My whole household has been able to fade COVID (that we know of) until this week. My 17yo son came down with a nasty sore throat yesterday, I was even saying something like “ha ha it’s weird how we’ve gotten to the point where somebody has cold symptoms and we don’t instantly panic thinking it must be COVID.” Of course he felt worse today, wife brought him to get checked out and he tested positive. FML.
I’ve known or heard about a least a handful of people here in NH who are triple vaxxed but who’ve tested positive in the past few weeks.
COVID sensed your insolence. My 17 year old also got a sore throat, I was like “OMG it’s finally COVID!” (see thread above), and it now appears it is not (negative rapid tests three days in a row).
It seems like COVID is close to being an endemic illness.
