It's been a while since I've updated everyone on our various pandemics, so let's do that. Here's monkeypox:
Roughly speaking, monkeypox is over. In the US we administered about 1 million doses of the vaccine compared to a few hundred thousand in Europe for a similar sized population. Despite the difference, both had almost identical experiences and the FDA recently approved a one-fifth dose, which apparently works just as well. In the end, it's not clear how much impact the vaccine had vs. simple immunity buildup among those who were infected.
COVID-19 isn't really trackable by case rates these days, so instead here's the ongoing fatality rate:
The United States is at 1 death per week per million, or roughly 300 deaths per week. That puts us right in the middle among peer countries.
Is there any data on the vaccination status of those who are dying these days?
Um, isn’t that 1 death per day per million?
Yea, Kevin clearly spaced on the "7-day rolling average".
So we're actually at 2100 deaths per week, and likely heading back up to "a 9/11 per week" as it gets colder.
Yep. The week ending Nov. 2 (CDC has gone weekly, data updated on Wednesdays) there were 2504 deaths attributed to COVID-19. -- https://bityl.co/FV4t
We've basically settled into a roughly 3-4% increase in overall mortality from pre-pandemic, with a lot (vast majority?) of that toll being borne by folks who are unwilling to take advantage of the research their tax dollars paid for.
Not great. But it should lessen with time, if the Russian Flu pandemic is anything to go by.
The good news regarding Covid is:
Preliminary data from Marin County show the updated booster formulation, first available September 1, is effectively protecting our residents. Of those over age 65 who are eligible, 45 percent have received the updated booster. There have been 22 hospitalizations in this age group over the same period - none of those hospitalized had received the updated booster. This means the hospitalization rate for those who have received the updated booster is zero in Marin, so far.
https://coronavirus.marinhhs.org/covid-19-status-update-11042022
The bad news is that the overall only a very low percentage of people are getting the bivalent booster.
We're starting to see papers potentially identifying Hoskins Paradox (which is similar to the Original Antigenic Sin of the imprinting of the original virus onto one's immune system), where repeated vaccinations produce worse outcomes than those who only had the initial 2-shot vaccination (or infection). Ideally, getting the bivalent as your initial vaccination would be the absolute best case scenario -- you get two variants imprinted onto your immune system that it will remember for years.
While there are those who rush out to get a booster shot as soon as they can, this is probably not the best choice. At the very least, you're not going to prevent an infection by boosting your neutralizing antibodies when there's a mismatch between it and the prevalent mutant. I might have mentioned why I wasn't getting that second booster this summer, despite the window opening up.
Up until now, we only had the monovalent that targeted the original strain. With the bivalent, we have a booster that generally addresses Omicron and specifically BA.5 and the two subvariants -- BQ.1 and BA.1.11 -- that are outcompeting the other variants right now. I'm hopeful that, even w/ Original Antigenic Sin, the bivalent disproves the Hoskins Paradox, given that it does boost neutralizing antibodies for Omicron and its subvariants.