It’s a major wave now, with an estimated new 900,000 infections per day, as my friend Jay Weiland estimated based on the 2 sources of US wastewater data (definitely worth following him at X or Threads). The slope of rise of SARS-CoV-2 levels is still steep, so we haven’t yet reached the plateau. It’s already towered beyond 4 prior waves of the US pandemic.

State-of-the-Wave

It’s related to the variants KP.3 and KP.3.1.1, which together now account for more than half of new cases in the US. And KP.3.1.1 is on the move, overtaking KP.3 as shown by the new CDC data below. A big jump in the past 2 weeks.

Fortunately, the rise in levels of the virus, still going up in all 4 major US regions (most recent CDC data below) has not been linked with as much severe Covid (absolute increase) as was seen in prior waves, but compared to last week there was a relative increase of 25% of deaths and 12% increase in emergency room visits due to Covid. No matter how you look at it, this is not a benign wave, folks.

God's plan I guess. It's brunch time.

I’m getting over my second infection, that I know of. I think almost everyone in this comm says that qualifier. Because we understand things like asymptomatic spread and false negative tests. And no matter how diligent we are with precautions, there’s still a chance you can get it. (Blessings on our brethren who haven’t left home in almost 5 years).

I mentioned I had COVID to someone I was speaking to over Zoom yesterday.

They said, “Yeah my son and my wife had it in 2022, but thankfully I’ve never had it.”

What the hell do you even say to that?

I need to restock and have no idea where to even begin lol

This is a Google doc, open it in incognito/private!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11ZZCVMjEcasUWrYH2eH3BqfSAGwNb6h2gn03YD4Gn7Y/htmlview

Direct Link to the Study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49891-w

Abstract:

Pervasive SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans have led to multiple transmission events to animals. While SARS-CoV-2 has a potential broad wildlife host range, most documented infections have been in captive animals and a single wildlife species, the white-tailed deer. The full extent of SARS-CoV-2 exposure among wildlife communities and the factors that influence wildlife transmission risk remain unknown. We sampled 23 species of wildlife for SARS-CoV-2 and examined the effects of urbanization and human use on seropositivity. Here, we document positive detections of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in six species, including the deer mouse, Virginia opossum, raccoon, groundhog, Eastern cottontail, and Eastern red bat between May 2022–September 2023 across Virginia and Washington, D.C., USA. In addition, we found that sites with high human activity had three times higher seroprevalence than low human-use areas. We obtained SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences from nine individuals of six species which were assigned to seven Pango lineages of the Omicron variant. The close match to variants circulating in humans at the time suggests at least seven recent human-to-animal transmission events. Our data support that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 has been widespread in wildlife communities and suggests that areas with high human activity may serve as points of contact for cross-species transmission.

Given that we know that Dogs can get long covid, gotta wonder about the rest of the animal kingdom.

non-archive link: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/will-this-be-san-diego-corona-con-comic-creators-come-down-with-covid/

I've also been loving all my preferred youtubers complaining about being sick after coming back from OpenSauce. Great stuff.

One of the ways I remind myself to not stop masking is that I'll search twitter for whatever convention I wanted to go to along with covid and watch the results come in.

https://twitter.com/search?q=sdcc%20covid&src=typed_query&f=live

1 in 26 people have covid on the west coast. 1 in 29 in the South. The rest of the country soon to follow.

There is also a new variant appearing (KP.3.1.1), which has a significant mutation which allows it to escape immunity gained from previous variants. It's expected to add to and extend the current waves.

It's less deadly than before, thankfully, and new variants haven't seemed to cause as much of a problem as the first few waves, but the new normal is still several times worse than the worst flu season, if only because it's around and spreading significantly most of the year. It's pretty neat how we are living in a time where we can watch society get significantly worse in real time on multiple fronts, including the spread of disease! And by "pretty neat" I mean:

Good thing brandon ended the pandemic by getting rid of testing, otherwise it might look bad right now!

Fetterman posted a message to X on Sunday afternoon, saying he is "experiencing mild symptoms" and is "following the appropriate CDC guidance."

The full posting said, "After a busy week in D.C., I've tested positive for COVID-19 and am experiencing mild symptoms. I'm grateful to be fully vaccinated and will be working from home, following the appropriate CDC guidance."

Good thing everyone in the US has the luxury of working from home or missing work if they're sick, especially if they're sick with COVID. Right?

Anyways, critical support to

I don’t even have Covid - this is a side effect of my new medication. Am I just supposed to wait this out for weeks or months? Why can’t I just be sedated until it’s over? Why won’t my neurologist call me back? Death to America.

Any advice on how to cope with this?

Methods

This cross-sectional study included 302 patients who recovered from COVID-19 (mild, n = 102; moderate, n = 102; severe, n = 98). We assessed intellectual quotient (IQ), attention, memory, processing speed, visual-constructive ability, as well as symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, at least eighteen months after infection. The mean length of hospitalization was Mdays=8.2 (SD = 3.9) and Mdays=14.4 (SD = 8.2) in the moderate and severe groups, respectively.

Results

Cognitive difficulties were present in all three groups: mild (n = 12, 11.7%), moderate (n = 40, 39.2%), and severe (n = 48, 48.9%). Using Multinomial Logistic Regression and considering the odds ratio, our results indicated that a one-point increase in sustained attention, visual memory, and working memory might decrease the odds of being categorized in the severe group by 20%, 24%, and 77%, respectively, compared to the mild group.

This is a really good like State of the Covid letter, of where we're at right now. It ain't great, obviously. This guy is an epidemiologist with a background in hospital infection control and emergency management.

i am in the core committee talking to a dude in the committee which is a palestine advocacy group, we were about covid 19 and i suggested we should implement mandatory masking policies for indoor events, after half our leadership was down with an illness. we are also in a summer surge

he has some kind of medical degree, and worked in long term care as a medical officer of some sort. I'm kind out of depth with this rhetoric tbh,

his comments

It is normal to get sick once a year and, in fact, healthy because it helps train your immune system. Some years you won't get sick, other will be twice.

Covid doesn't cause an impact on your immue system either. Sometimes you can be In a bit of a state of inflammation which happens in many viral infections. And long covid is a topic in itself. It has never been quantified by any and all testing except subjective

maybe he would be more receptive with super libbed up sources or something, i dunno what he would respect

In the cohort who were exposed to COVID-19 before vaccines were available, the incidence of type 2 diabetes was four times higher during the first 4 weeks after a diagnosis of COVID-19 than before or in the absence of COVID-19. Type 2 diabetes incidence remained elevated by 64% overall during the second year after diagnosis, was twice as high in people who were hospitalised with COVID-19, and was 11% higher in those not hospitalised with COVID-19. The majority of incident type 2 diabetes after COVID-19 was persistent. The increase in incidence of type 2 diabetes after COVID-19 was markedly attenuated in vaccinated compared with unvaccinated people (1.6 times higher vs 8. 8 times higher during weeks 1–4 after COVID-19 diagnosis). The incidence of type 1 diabetes was elevated only during the first year after COVID-19 diagnosis....

Around 60% of cases of incident type 2 diabetes persisted—defined as being on glucose-lowering medication or having an HbA1c concentration consistent with type 2 diabetes at 4 months after diagnosis—with a similar proportion of persistent type 2 diabetes diagnoses observed in people after COVID-19 (57%) and before or in the absence of COVID-19 (62%). Using a similar definition of persistence, 56% of all cases of newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes persisted up to 1 year post-COVID-19 in a previous study.21 Additionally, 35% of newly diagnosed cases of prediabetes after COVID-19 persisted at 6 months.21 These previous studies were in patients who were hospitalised; we found slightly higher levels of persistence in people who were hospitalised (837 [61%] of 1382) than in those who were not hospitalised (2649 [56%] of 4731).

On July 18, Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Despite having symptoms, he’d spent the morning shaking hands with voters and workers before bothering to test during yet another massive surge of the virus; we won’t be getting breathless health updates about the peasants he exposed, nor will those infected be receiving any of the free medical treatment the President received from the comfort of his isolation bed, in his vacation home. The New York Times reported that he looked ill and unsteady as he walked to Air Force One (maskless) and was helped into his limousine, then carted back to his beach house in Rehoboth.

On July 19, Biden tweeted that he was “stuck at home with COVID”; most Americans, of course, have to return to work while ill these days, even when experiencing symptoms. His administration has thoroughly minimized the illness, with his former COVID response coordinator calling masking “fringe", and his CDC encouraging people to end isolation when they’ve been without a fever for one day, a standard that has absolutely no scientific relationship to infectiousness. (Amidst the wall-to-wall minimizing and ever-changing guidance, most employers interpret this most recent update to mean “no isolation”).

. . .

It was a poetically appropriate end for Biden, who, as hundreds of thousands died on his watch, alternated between ignoring COVID, joking about it, mocking masks, and appearing ignorant of the strict COVID protocols that his staff used to protect him for years while his administration unwound protections for everybody else.

In fact, in order to meet with or be in the room with Joe Biden at all, you had to submit to PCR testing for COVID-19 right up until this past March; it only took four months of life in the "new normal” he’d thrust the rest of us into years ago for Biden to get a taste of his own medicine.

WastewaterSCAN is the dashboard a lot of us have switched over to after biobot sunsetted their dashboard. They've only dropped 49 sites, but that's still less data in a dwindling realm. Idk if it's related or not but I've lost yet another major county's data in Florida.

https://data.wastewaterscan.org/

Also, tbh, I prefer biobot's dashboard, but I guess in the land of a million freaking toothpaste brands having reliable analytics for an ongoing pandemic is too much to ask.

im also dumb and they're expired

Random twitter thread that popped up for me. That first link, to the reddit post about some random dude in Oregon who thinks he has bird flu - giving me real late 2019 flashbacks. I remember back then when we all still thought it was contained in China (or maybe it had been confirmed in Washington state at that point - can't remember) some reddit post from a guy in NYC who was absolutely sure he had Covid but there were no tests available and his doctor was telling him to just stay home and not leave the house. Don't remember exactly when that was but I feel like late 2019...a harbinger of things to come.

I was talking to some guy on here whose friend's dad died of COVID winter 2023. The interesting part is that it was his first time getting COVID

Anyway, I want to talk to him again and find out more deets but I can't find him.

Linktr.ee/covidisntover

I'm not affiliated with these folks in any way, nor have I gotten around to joining them. Yet. One of these days.

The final update of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines was on February 29, 2024. PDFs of the Guidelines can be downloaded until August 16, 2024, when the website will be shut down.

Not that the site was very good. Their Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 Infection page mentions masks once on the whole page and does not mention nasal sprays:

The risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission can be reduced by covering coughs and sneezes, wearing a well-fitted mask around others, and isolating when experiencing symptoms. Frequent handwashing also effectively reduces the risk of infection.

Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent COVID-19.

Older versions of their PDF mention N95s. The only mention of N95s, other than recommending them for healthcare workers, is to claim that surgical masks are just as good:

There is evidence from studies of viral diseases, including SARS, that both surgical masks and N95 respirators reduce the risk of transmission.6 Moreover, surgical masks are probably not inferior to N95 respirators for preventing the transmission of respiratory viral infections; a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that compared the protective effects of medical masks and N95 respirators demonstrated that the use of medical masks did not increase the incidence of laboratory- confirmed viral respiratory infections (including coronavirus infections) or clinical respiratory illness.

(That is incorrect.) The latest version does not mention the existence of N95s or KN95s, it just says "a well-fitted mask". And N95s and KN95s are not mentioned on the site itself, outside of these PDFs.