China cares a lot about preventing Covid. I haven’t written an additional China post because my sources have not turned up much additional information, and the situation does not seem to have dramatically changed, so I’m waiting until situation warrants an update. One development was mass testing going on in Beijing, raising worries about lockdown there which could be important politically, but so far the lockdowns haven’t happened.
Great update as always. Minor note: the transit agency that brought back the mask mandate is BART, which is a multi-county system that's mostly outside of San Francisco.
San Francisco's own transit system, SFMTA, dropped their mask requirement and hasn't brought it back. I was pleasantly surprised by their refreshingly sane twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sfmta_muni/status/1516917173314146304
Perhaps the most annoying thing about the failure to update the vaccines is that this is actually a strong point of the mRNA vaccine; It is MUCH faster and cheaper to update than conventional vaccines. But now that we're back at impulse power, bureaucratic inertia has returned with a vengeance.
But I think we have to face that the current administration not only doesn't care about Covid, they likely never did care about it except as a tool to achieve certain goals. It having been blunted by the general population getting over Covid hysteria, they've moved on to newer tools. Well, at least that keeps them from doubling down on economically damaging measures.
Speaking of tools, I continue to wish that you'd display your case and graph numbers in a population normalized form, such as cases per 100k; Remember, these regions vary considerably in total population! People may naively look at your graphs and think, "Oh, the South is doing terrible!" and not realize that the South is more populous than the other regions, so of course their raw numbers are higher.
It was built by a Microsoft engineer. Pulls it's data from publicly available info(https://healthdata.gov/Health/COVID-19-Public-Therapeutic-Locator/rxn6-qnx8) about courses of treatment (each is 10 pills) shipped to each state and courses distributed to patients. You can go to each state and see all the sites that have it. You can also see a graph showing how many courses each site in the state has, and how many of the courses it has have been distributed. Many of the graphs are pretty flat -- meaning that the most or all of the Paxlovid shipped to that site are just sitting on the shelves. Arkansas pharmacies, I noticed, are particularly bad. Here's Arkansas: https://rrelyea.github.io/paxlovid/?state=AR
He's also got sites for looking up Molnupiravir, Bebtelovimab and Evusheld.
It looks almost cute that your discussion is about Covid vaccines for under-5 that seems to be coming if slowly, while here in Sweden it’s not even allowed for under-12 and nothing suggests that this will change.
FHM, our CDC, has been outright in favor of kids getting infected. While it was likely correct to keep schools open, leaked letters show that the reason was to ensure spread of Covid among schoolchildren. Yes, really, explicitly.
The FHM has been simply ghastly - monkeys with darts would have performed much better.
I know it’s a typo, but banning methanol cigarettes sounds like a good use of the FDA’s resources. Menthol cigarettes, less so.
Great update as always. Minor note: the transit agency that brought back the mask mandate is BART, which is a multi-county system that's mostly outside of San Francisco.
San Francisco's own transit system, SFMTA, dropped their mask requirement and hasn't brought it back. I was pleasantly surprised by their refreshingly sane twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sfmta_muni/status/1516917173314146304
Perhaps the most annoying thing about the failure to update the vaccines is that this is actually a strong point of the mRNA vaccine; It is MUCH faster and cheaper to update than conventional vaccines. But now that we're back at impulse power, bureaucratic inertia has returned with a vengeance.
But I think we have to face that the current administration not only doesn't care about Covid, they likely never did care about it except as a tool to achieve certain goals. It having been blunted by the general population getting over Covid hysteria, they've moved on to newer tools. Well, at least that keeps them from doubling down on economically damaging measures.
Speaking of tools, I continue to wish that you'd display your case and graph numbers in a population normalized form, such as cases per 100k; Remember, these regions vary considerably in total population! People may naively look at your graphs and think, "Oh, the South is doing terrible!" and not realize that the South is more populous than the other regions, so of course their raw numbers are higher.
Re: Paxlovid not being used, thought you and readers should know about this site: https://rrelyea.github.io/paxlovid/
It was built by a Microsoft engineer. Pulls it's data from publicly available info(https://healthdata.gov/Health/COVID-19-Public-Therapeutic-Locator/rxn6-qnx8) about courses of treatment (each is 10 pills) shipped to each state and courses distributed to patients. You can go to each state and see all the sites that have it. You can also see a graph showing how many courses each site in the state has, and how many of the courses it has have been distributed. Many of the graphs are pretty flat -- meaning that the most or all of the Paxlovid shipped to that site are just sitting on the shelves. Arkansas pharmacies, I noticed, are particularly bad. Here's Arkansas: https://rrelyea.github.io/paxlovid/?state=AR
He's also got sites for looking up Molnupiravir, Bebtelovimab and Evusheld.
It looks almost cute that your discussion is about Covid vaccines for under-5 that seems to be coming if slowly, while here in Sweden it’s not even allowed for under-12 and nothing suggests that this will change.
FHM, our CDC, has been outright in favor of kids getting infected. While it was likely correct to keep schools open, leaked letters show that the reason was to ensure spread of Covid among schoolchildren. Yes, really, explicitly.
The FHM has been simply ghastly - monkeys with darts would have performed much better.