BA2 penetrations seems to be 50-60% as an key inflection point and the US is currently at about 25%. With the current doubling rate it will take 2-4 weeks until we will see most likely cases rise again significantly and most likely in the NE first
Interestingly Jason Salemi wrote that CDC very recently changed their metrics wrt community level vs community transmission and here he compares them
Outside of being more infectious, Omicron BA.2 seems to be the same as BA.1.
Having been infected by BA.1 gives immunity to BA.2, so the latter can’t create a new wave the way Omicron did after Delta. Which is why it’s not a “variant of concern.”
BA.2 can accelerate an ongoing Omicron wave, extending a peak or temporarily reversing a decline, which effect you can see clearly in the Denmark graph.
There is an interesting new paper in Cell that shows that breakthrough infections with omicron only leads to a relatively low increase in antibody titer and provide reduced protection
As I noted last month, the CDC (for once) explained in detail why and how they came up with and verified their new community level ratings. They shifted focus from just transmission (which with Omicron was no longer very useful) a combination of transmission, hospital beds, and admissions.
Looking at the reaction of many epidemiologists they tend to disagree with this move by the CDC (and based on the last two years many of the epidemiologists who disagree now where much more accurate about potential next steps, required data etc than the CDC)
Can you point me to a detailed criticism of this?
I’d certainly be a lot happier if we had detailed weekly county-level reports on who’s been infected (particularly broken down by age) and where (home / school / restaurant / bar / gym / public transit / work, work broken down by industry).
Just look across Biotwitter - in today’s world many scientists (not only epidemiologists) use Biotwitter to communicate their thoughts on many different scientists questions
I’ll take that as a no.
I take that you don’t know how today’s (even scientific) discussions work.
I’m not looking for social media discussions, I’m looking for the published end product. If experts really think the CDC got it wrong they’ll do more than just chat about it online.
If you follow how scientists (even many, many very well established groups across different science disciplines) are publishing their results over the last 5-10 years you will see that classical publications are becoming less and less relevant and alternative approaches (including social media) are getting more and more attention and use. There is a reason why the whole rxiv directions have started to play such an important role. The current scientific publishing approach (particular with Elsevier but also others) is pretty much broken and if you look to get scientific publication on a topic which needs a fast response (like CDC approaches) you have to look elsewhere including social media.
Not the best summary but touches on a few topics
In this case we’re talking about policy so it’s not a research issue. If public health officials and epidemiologists disagree with the CDC’s metrics, they can’t bring that to the public’s attention by tweeting at each other in some social media backwater.
I agree as long as everything written by self-proclaimed experts isn’t accepted by readers in the same way as if they were peer-reviewed “gospel-truth science”. One of the sources of information that I follow most regularly is articles written by or interviews with credentialed experts in the field and published in credible news outlets, such as NYT and The Week. I don’t follow social media except here on FTC, and many of the articles posted by people here have come from news sources. Many of these have been pretty good and might have been otherwise overlooked or hard to find. I find that when multiple views are written on the same subject and offer similar – or differing – opinions in these media, they help to inform my own opinion. Some of the journal articles are so elaborately detailed that they’re often difficult to understand other than by a specialist in the same field, although I usuually look at those, too.
You might not like it that way but that’s how they are doing it through different social media channels
This approach by scientists has obviously also its issues as it allows a number of people appear like they would be experts even though they don’t know what they are talking about - a good example is Monica Gandhi who was writing some stuff for NYT (who also cited in this thread) and who was also recently ripped to pieces in a TV interview by a journalist as somebody who is constantly wrong (and he showed a nice, long list of prediction and explanation and how she was always completely wrong).
What we will see now more and more is longer term data on the risk and impact of long covid. The focus will shift from dying from covid to impact of being infected and its potential outcomes in long covid - here is s recent paper on 12 months follow up on the increased risk on getting diabetes once infected by covid
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(22)00044-4/fulltext
The focus won’t change if a new variant comes along to cause another major surge.
Those are the kinds of people I was referring to when I said “self-proclaimed experts”. It does unfortunately require some filtering on the reader’s part to avoid assigning credibility to everything written by every “scientist” who appears in or on the news.
Alameda County had a small uptick this week.
| 2/24/22 | 3/3/22 | 3/10/22 | 03/17/22 | 03/24/22 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COVID Inpatient Bed Utilization | 8.0% | 5.6% | 4.5% | 3.1% | 2.5% |
| COVID Hospital Admissions per 100k | 9.1 | 7.4 | 6 | 4.1 | 3.8 |
| Cases per 100k | 106.02 | 279.24* | 60.07 | 47.93 | 49.92 |
| COVID-19 Community Level | Low | Medium* | Low | Low | Low |
*wrong
The CDC moved the download link and changed the file, now you get the full history (click Export at top right).
