Dude, Thanksgiving was less than a week ago. The reduction in 7DMA is almost entirely due to extremely low cases reported on Thursday and Friday and, to a much smaller extent, Saturday and Sunday. That backlog isn’t going to start clearing until weekdays start getting reported.
EDIT: Here’s are new cases for the last 7 days compared to the corresponding day from the prior week:
Cases are up every day until Thanksgiving. You can also see that there’s normally a weekend backlog that gets cleared on Mondays and Tuesdays (reported Tuesday and Wednesday). In a sense it’s too soon to tell, but are we really thinking that people were just too busy traveling and having indoor gatherings in large groups to contract COVID? Cases were already growing, and the holiday would have made them grow faster, not slow down.
But the US should quickly invest in other tools as well, experts said, including testing, genomic sequencing and surveillance, better communication, and a strong focus on global vaccine equity to prevent the emergence of new variants.
All of that would prepare America better to deal with a variant that many experts suspect is probably already inside the country, even if undetected so far.
Sequencing positive tests is also important to understand which variants are circulating. The US lags behind many countries in genomic sequencing, and there are vast differences between states.
“We’re not doing nearly enough genomic sequencing in this country still,” Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at New York University and Bellevue Hospital, told the Guardian. “I’m sure we have Omicron here in the US; we just haven’t detected it yet.”
Moderna boss predicts current vaccines may be less effective against Omicron
The chief executive of the US drugmaker Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be less effective against Omicron than they have been against the Delta version, sending global stock markets sharply lower.
Stéphane Bancel said while it would take two weeks to get data on how the existing vaccines perform against the new Covid variant – and whether it causes severe disease – it will take several months to tweak the current vaccines to tackle Omicron.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level … we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Bancel told the Financial Times.
He suggested that pharma companies would struggle between targeting Omicron and the existing Covid variants, warning it would be risky to shift Moderna’s entire production capacity to an Omicron-specific jab.
They have updated hospital admissions from yesterday though. Last week went from +580 to +647 which will steepen his curve. Still think that “0 days” might have to be revised backwards in time.
The graphs need to be interpreted with care though, especially the hospitalization one. As you can sort of see on the right side of those graphs, the beta wave didn’t really ever end, it just trailed off to a low level, then got drowned out by Delta. Similar for Beta vs OG. Delta did run out of steam in SA though, and case numbers were down to the lowest levels of the entire pandemic. So in the earlier cases, there were people getting diagnosed and getting hospitalized with other variants during the “wave.” That’s still true to some extent for Omicron, but less so.
I mean, there is a ton of room for the vaccines to be less effective but still highly protective. It’s not a binary thing. Slipping to a hypothetical ~80% effectiveness against infection and ~95% against hospitalization and death is not really a cause for alarm.
That’s true. The problem is that “well you still have 90%+ protection against severe disease and transmit 60% less even with omicrom if you get boosted” (just making up numbers) is going to be very incompatible with the US new normal if this is as/more transmissible than delta and we want a functioning healthcare system in 2022.
EDIT: On another front, looks like 216K US cases reported yesterday/7 day average back to 80K. We’ll see what happens with today’s numbers to get a better view as to case trends.
Need some advice from more knowledgable people than I. Woke up this morning feeling a little sick. I feel very similar to how I felt the first time I had COVID, like I’m hungover with a light cough and runny nose. I went and got a rapid test and it was negative, but I read that I may have gotten tested too early and should probably wait a few days. My basic understanding was that if you had symptoms then you had a high enough viral load for the tests. So my question is, is this negative result reliable, or should I stay home for a couple days and get tested again at the end of the week?
You might just have a basic virus. I had symptoms for a few days in October before getting a PCR test. Was certain that I had a mild course of it but it ended up being negative for COVID. Symptoms went away a couple of days later.
You’ve probably got something non-covid, but I’d stay home anyway, because you’re going to draw a lot of looks if you’re out in public coughing. Is there some major thing you were hoping to do that a negative PCR test would give you the confidence to do?
I’m just getting over something similar. The last 12 days or so I started with a sore throat, then a bad cough for several days. I took at home tests every 2 days, and then went and took a pcr. All negative. I do know someone recently who had similar symptoms and tested negative on 3 at home tests before finally testing positive.
Got a Moderna booster yesterday at 11am, originally Pfizer gang. Holy shit did that mess me up. I’m actually taking today off work since I got <4 hours sleep thanks to the fever and soreness all over. I did have a fairly strong response to the first 2, but this was another level
I had Moderna all three, but had the same with the booster. Some response to the first 2, but third one was knocked flat for most of the next day. More fatigue and shivering and sort of the same sleep pattern I have when I get an illness than soreness, but was the first one where I actually lost function the day after, really did hit a bit. Not looking forward to number 4.
