https://www.cdc.gov/acip/downloads/slide...es-508.pdf

shows effectiveness, waning.  Twice a year shots will be recommended for 65+.

I noticed a Viewpoint in JAMA Online, dated 7 Oct 2024, by Patel et al.
"COVID-19 Therapeutics for Nonhospitalized Older Adults"

Quoting just some stats from the Viewpoint:

Quote:Using 2021-2022 data, modeling showed that an increase in uptake of treatment to 80% would reduce hospitalizations by 42% and deaths by 51%. A 2024 survey of 2858 adults at high risk of severe disease found that only 16.5% had ever received COVID-19 treatment and only 23.3% would choose to take an antiviral if prescribed. Despite the demonstrated efficacy of outpatient treatment at preventing severe outcomes among persons at high risk, most older adults have not received treatment

"Your Local Epidemiologist" (YLE) is putting out a series of short blogs on what went wrong with the messaging about COVID vaccines.
It is worth a quick look.

(If you're not familiar with YLE's work, she is an epidemiologist who posted blogs and sent out newsletters since early COVID intended for general audiences, and attracted quite a following.  She has been recognized for her efforts in communicating health concerns.)

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack...munication

(In case anyone is still monitoring this)
The approvals have been done. The vaccine is at, or arriving at, pharmacies now.

I am scheduled to get a (Pfizer) vaccine on Friday 9/15.

Subtitled “For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults”, the New York Times, long a supporter of closing down American society for an extended period when COVID appeared, has an article on the devastating impact that policy had on American children.

We can't say "It's back" since it never left.  There has been talk of the tripledemic and it is upon us.  I'm not going to talk about RSV or Influenza here.  They are serious on their own, and now they're adding to the strain of the US health system.

The major paper of Santa Clara county hid that the county moved into the CDC's High Community Transmission Level in the middle of the 6th paragraph of a single article last week.   The Santa Clara County Public Health Department didn't acknowledge this transition or advise its citizens through a press release.


Monday's San Francisco Chronicle has a story (probably behind a paywall)
  "COVID cases are soaring in S.F. and L.A. — but one of them is doing worse"
The picture with it is of a SF Giants - LA Dodgers game with someone holding up a "Beat L.A." sign.
It was from the COVID era (July 2021).  While it was outdoors, 47 pictured fans have no mask, 2 wear a mask, and 1 has a mask below his chin.

The numbers for L.A. are a bit worse, but S.F. is getting there.
The amount of COVID in the SF Bay Area, judging from the sewage, is the highest it has ever been - beating the Omicron (BA.1) peak from January or the summer peak (BA.2) and dwarfing the Delta peak.   Most people are spreading it without regard to others' health.


A couple of weeks back, a SF Supervisor said Fentanyl was "driving the largest public health calamity since AIDS"  The author of the article using that quote without any context to show its blindness.  (CDC reports the lowest weekly death toll (since April 2020) with COVID as a cause is 1,344 (w.e. 4/23/22), and reported that in 2017 the death toll with a HIV-related cause was 5,534 for the entire year.)

I know several 65+ year-old people with (possible) COVID.  One refused a test.  Another didn't bother with a test when her son (who gave it to her at Thanksgiving, where he (a nurse) knew he was sick) tested positive, thus preventing her from getting Paxlovid.

I'm shelling out some more money to buy more masks.  It ain't over...

I  don't understand why we didn't see monetization of masks.

Imagine the differences in the behavior of Americans
  if every 6-pack of Bud Light had a KN95 mask  with "Bud Light" across it,
  if every 24-pack of Coca Cola had their logo on an included mask, 
  if  Morgan-Stanley made a mask with "Morgan-Stanley:  Put your money where your mouth is!"
  if Kaiser put their logo on surgical masks,
  if MLB & NFL &... were selling masks with the logos of their teams
  if someone made a "Make America Healthy Again" mask

Northern California sewage monitoring continues...

The level of COVID in the area is mostly continuing to decline slowly, but 2022 has been and is still higher than 2021.

There is now a page that shows which COVID variants are most common. (currently BA.4 + BA.5 are 100%).

RSV is climbing fast in most measured areas.
Human metapneumovirus is climbing.
Flu is not a big issue yet (but I've heard it is big in San Diego).
Monkeypox is pretty much limited to San Francisco.


Two ongoing sources of COVID info:  
Steve Shafer's irregular newsletter
Your Local Epidemiologist

Steve Shafer's Oct. 1 letter has item #7 about something from Nature news where a unique variant was discovered in sewage and was traced back to the individual in whom it evolved.

I just got my bivalent booster and flu shot this weekend. After going with Moderna for all my prior shots I went with Pfizer. 

I was shocked to hear that only 4% of eligible folks have gotten it. 

This seems to me to be an indictment the government's blasé messaging around the pandemic and our society's eagerness to hope it away.  

If folks here have not gotten it and are eligible may I ask why? Are you waiting for the Novavax vaccine?

Italian study finds SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples collected before December 2019

We've seen these claims before.  I can't see how they're possibly true when SARS-CoV-2 was so infectious.
How could it be as widely spread as they claim without having triggered an epidemic?
Are they suggesting it was a pandemic earlier, but not enough people sick to notice, and no one was dying from it?
Boy, won't the conspiracy theory people have fun with that.  (And especially with the association to skin eruptions.)

I don't know if they're seeing some precursor infection, or have contaminated samples or what.
At least at one point in the article, they indicate that the samples failed to be detectable by PCR, indicating that the amount of viral material was very little.  I wonder if they've proven that they wouldn't detect it in, say, similar samples from 1995, or even in the Shroud of Turin.

If you read the article closely, you'll notice that the mutations in the alleged pre-pandemic RNA were the same mutations found in the early pandemic virus in Italy.  That's consistent with the samples being contaminated.  Or it is consistent with Italy having had spontaneous generation of SARS-CoV-2 that didn't create an epidemic until after China had their epidemic.  I hope the research report addresses this.

Note they try to suggest it was related to suspected measles/rubella cases, but then offer no positive evidence that it was.  Indeed, their evidence, if believed, would suggest it is not related.  (And, while some COVID patients may have had skin lesions (and caries, for that matter), it certainly wasn't a common symptom, so why would there be a noticeable number of people with COVID-associated skin lesions, but not notice they (and a lot more) had a cough, pneumonia, etc.?)

As I understand it, this statement in the article is wrong: "Despite the lack of a definitive timeline on when SARS-CoV-2 initially emerged, previous evolutionary studies indicate that the virus likely circulated in China for several months before the first outbreak was recorded in Wuhan, China."

As I recall (and I may be wrong, or different opinions may have been offered), the evolutionary studies suggested a (late?) October origin, some 6 weeks or so before the first known symptom (December 5).  They searched for evidence even earlier than that, of course, and found none.  Nothing I've seen suggested it "circulated in China".