theCOVIDboard

It's been a month since anyone's felt a need to post anything.  That's good news (but also could be a sign of burnout).

The CDC is finally showing wastewater surveillance numbers.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker...rveillance

The data is unequally collected in the US.  It is most densely collected in OH, WI, IL, KS, NY, NC, CO.  A number of states have zero or one sites collecting data.

While 61% of the sites have levels reduced by 10% or more, 33% have levels increased by 10% or more.  9% have gone up by a factor of 10 or more (possibly because they were 0 before and are now 1??)

The number of samples with detection has gone down over the last two weeks.
They don't say anything about variant detection in wastewater.
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For herd immunity, the seroprevalence numbers is a good way to look at things.
  https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker...prevalence

Of blood donors (ie, a select population that is surely not representative of the entire population), 94.7% have antibodies (infection or vaccination).

Separately, the percentage of people that have had COVID is 43.3%, based on antibodies.
The estimate is that 9.8% of the population got their first case of COVID between Dec. 26 and Jan. 29.


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There have been a number of interesting papers that have come out recently about the effects of COVID.
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In variants, the CDC indicates 0.0% Delta.  Of the 3 Omicron variants, B.1.1.529 (15%) was being slowly supplanted by BA.1.1 (74%) but now BA.2 (12%) is starting to grow, depressing BA.1.1.

I think the lack of posts is mostly good news, with some burnout sprinkled in and also more attention being focused on Ukraine.  I think for me personally one of the greatest curiosities going forward is the emergence of variants, and updated vaccines hopefully including a pan-variant vaccine.

For the last 5 measurements (since March 5), COVID in sewage for Palo Alto has been higher, hitting about 4x what it was 2 weeks ago, and in line with the first half of February. The other areas (incl. nearby Stanford, San Jose, San Mateo Co., San Francisco) do not show any real increase.

Hopefully this is just some local aberration that doesn't grow or spread.

I am burnt out but I do drop in from time to time to see what updates there are. I thought we all stopped using the term herd immunity?

At the small education community I run we are updating our risk level triggers and our quarantine and isolation cutoffs. We are the only school that I am aware of in Central Texas that still requires masks. We spent all last year outdoors when not remote, and three months this year have been painfully remote (Sep, Jan-Feb), during which time no local schools went remote, and the reality is that even though our community takes the pandemic very seriously or at least appreciates the efforts, if we go remote any more we are going to suffer an even greater enrollment drop. Because we filter our air to > 6ACH in each room, and >8 in the bathrooms, plus have excellent ventilation and universal masking with KN95, KF94, or N95s we believe we can shift our risk level assessment protocols so that the triggers for the higher stages have higher incident rates and positivity rates locally, and we are now allowing a small group to remain indoors at risk level 4 (second highest risk level) while the rest are outdoors, and at risk level 5 (highest risk level) we are all outdoors unless the health system is at capacity and then we go remote. I think that barring an extended Omicron type wave in the future that means we can avoid being remote for any more than maybe a week or so.

Starting next year we are going to explicitly state a vaccine requirement (vaccine exemptions will be considered and rarely accepted) which will be painful for some but will serve as a good screening mechanism so we don't bring in any more families who want to argue about Covid safety.

We may seem extreme on the Covid safety end of things (we are, by definition, being the only ones who do this around here) but our community has at its core a charge to center the needs most impacted by our decisions. So we will continue to push ahead until it is financially impossible to remain open. I greatly appreciate all the work that folks have put in to educate others on this board (and the Cardboard before Covid convos were shut down).

seems like most of the updates this week are for Omicron surges in CHina including HK (although dropping now), and Europe where I will visit soon.   And then the debate about 4th booster.