(2023-01-12) Zvi M Covid011223 Unexpected Spike In Deaths

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 1/12/23: Unexpected Spike in Deaths. Quite a lot of deaths got reported by quite a lot of different states this week. Case numbers did not spike, and instead actively declined. What’s going on? It is right after Christmas and New Years, which means the least reliable reporting of the year, and no one cares much anymore – Indiana and Illinois didn’t bother reporting anything on either front – so the obvious explanation is this is a lot of backlog dumping with the new year....What I am not worried about, given the case numbers, is that this wave is going to get out of hand

The Numbers

A number of states reported what looks like multiple weeks of backlogs of deaths, numbers that were absurdly high. Indiana and Illinois did not report at all.

Physical World Modeling

my views – mono-valent booster would have been better, updating for the actual circulating strain would have been better, it is likely a small mistake (not medical advice!) for most people to get or not get boosted, the vulnerable benefit enough it seems clearly worthwhile for them.

In Other Covid News

Stanford Medicine scientists pinpoint Covid-19 virus’s entry and exit ports inside our noses, highly useful information for potentially creating a nasal spray to prevent infection

Remember

The origin of the false ‘more athletes died this year than in the past 38 years’ claim is even dumber than you would think

We can safely skip the examples. Two completely different-in-kind lists were compared. This is not a good faith mistake.

The Twitter Files: Vaccine Data Edition

Alex Berenson is out with a new ‘Twitter Files’ entry

It was, shall we say, an interesting choice by Musk to give full archive access at Twitter to someone this dedicated to opposing vaccinations

This was a textbook example of the rules laid out in How to Bounded Distrust.

So yes, this Tweet is at least deeply cynical and intentionally misleading, with the goal of stopping vaccinations. Are you going to strike it down and potentially ban the account for it? Are you going to ‘suppress debate’ and make such judgments from on high? Good question. I’m not saying I would have banned him. But I understand.

China

Crematoriums and hospitals reported to still be super busy, but less busy than a few weeks ago. Things will continue to be not good for a while, but decent chance they have already peaked, or at least peaked until the next strain rolls in.

Other Medical and Research News

NHS in the UK is failing to provide adequate emergency care as response times spike to deadly levels

In many places I am a skeptic that more healthcare results in better health. Emergency care is one of the places where this is very clearly not the case. Emergency care saves lives. Delayed emergency care kills people.

The right thing to do, assuming a fixed NHS budget, would be to shift away from other less impactful healthcare, and reallocate to the emergency systems. Alas, I do not expect this.