The LA Times says that Colorado may hold a lesson for California:
California is entering the holiday season with an uncertain outlook. Optimistically, new weekly coronavirus cases have become stable statewide; the vaccination rate is higher than in many other states, and there are few signs right now of a big winter surge.
But the deteriorating conditions in Colorado offer a cautionary tale of how things can go south quickly....In Colorado, 62.8% of all residents are fully vaccinated, almost identical to California’s 62.7%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the differences in weekly case rates are stark: CDC data show California currently has the 10th lowest out of all states, and Colorado has the eighth highest.
It's worth remembering that researchers long ago changed their estimates of herd immunity from 60-70% of the population being vaccinated to 90+% of the population—including children—being vaccinated. Obviously more vaccination is better than less, but as long as we remain well below 90% we should expect that we will continue to suffer periodic outbreaks. Colorado is having one now, and there's little reason to think that California or any other state will avoid one over the next few months.
POSTSCRIPT: Why the change in estimates of what it takes to reach herd immunity? Part of it was the introduction of the Delta variant. Part of it is the fact that our vaccines appear to get less effective over time. And part of it is better modeling of vaccines—like the ones we have—that don't prevent viral transmission.
ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this means that we will probably never eliminate COVID-19 via herd immunity. We can manage COVID-19, but it's likely to eventually become endemic, like the flu.
You mean it isn’t all about the political color of the state? …
I suspect you would have to oook more granular then States, more like County wide. NY Times had a nice chart yesterday, large swaths of lower NY, act and Penn were not getting much of a surge ( more yes but not a ton). The upstate areas of NY and Penn were getting crushed. Both areas Red and Unvaccinated. Colorado is similar. Denver not so bad, Bolder not so bad south by Col Springs awful. It too is Red and un vaxxed.
New York State has 20+ million people thanks to the NYC area. A high case count, they do not have. Hospitalization is low.....state wide. Bad post.
I shall ignore you ignorance once again
In the case of Colorado, while the Plandemic is a Fake Chinese Biologic, the results of COVID infection are real, & any deaths are God's vengeance for the Centennial State empowering a gay governor.
Please, whoever wrote this article is a idiot. Colorado case counts slowly steadily rising since july. There ICU's are less full than last year. Irresponsible journalism at its finest. Reeducation is needed.
That's going to be rough on hospitals if every year they have to deal with one or two waves of Covid-19 crowding the ICUs. Better hope those anti-COVID drugs pan out.
Republicans will solve that by passing laws preventing doctors from mentioning it.
If covid waves become a regular thing, presumably ICU capacities will be increased to compensate.
Given that herd immunity is unlikely in the US, it would be great to see widespread, inexpensive rapid, Covid testing. Broad and frequent testing would clearly reduce Covid spread….
It’s still kind of a pain getting tested and the home tests are expensive. That really needs to change.
Nope the opposite needs to happen. End all tests for vaccinated people. Few people would even remember covid 19.
This is GOOD NEWS for Aaron Rodgers & Antonio Brown.
Ah yes, the genius idea of "if you don't test for it, COVID will just magically disappear"
If only the same could happen to your idiotic and bigoted rants.
It will because not enough people are getting sick. Idiot.
Once again, the stupid, stupid, ignorant fallacy that COVID-19 is a problem because "a lot of people will get sick [ and die ]."
COVID-19 is much much worse than a bad flu year, but it's real risk to our society is that it is extremely transmissable and enough people require hospitalization that even within "hardly anyone I know has it", the public health care system can be overloaded.
As an individual, your chance of dying from COVID-19 (or even being particularly sick) is extremely low (at least in the USA). But as a regular person, your chance of some medical condition that will make you appreciate a functioning health care system is extremely high. COVID19 threatens every person who may need healthcare, even if it doesn't threaten a particularly large number of people with sickness or death.
Remember "Flatten the Curve". That was the right message all along. Most of us are eventually going to be exposed to COVID19, the problem is trying to make that happen slowly enough that our hsopital and health care systems can continue to function normally.
That's right. It's not all about you. It's not even really about any individuals. COVID19 is a *public* health emergency, not a personal health emergency.
+1
Only if people who have been exposed get tested, and those who test positive self-quarantine, whether or not they are symptomatic. Do you think the folks who are currently refusing to wear masks and/or get vaccinated are going to coöperate with those protocols?
We have free, very accessible testing here in Western MA (thanks to UMass). Still number going up. You have to be well-informed and motivated to get tested. What I'd like to see is more outreach to get people tested, and to get vaccination to people who are less connected, less locally informed, etc. It would help to have a better-funded, more extended public health infrastructure. Public schools, library, and senior center are sites of access and outreach. But that leaves a lot of people on their own.
Be careful of repeating the "vaccines don't prevent transmission" line:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/22/most-pernicious-anti-vaccine-talking-point/
More accurate is to say that vaccines -- like masks, ventilation, avoiding crowded venues -- reduce transmission, and have the added benefit of providing much better odds of a good outcome if one actually becomes infected. But nothing is guaranteed. All of these things lower Rₜ and the further we push it below one, the better for all of us.
+1
Alas, all too many subscribe to an all-or-nothing philosophy when it comes to accepting if something “works.”
Seems to me that whether they accept that "all-or-nothing" position is almost 100% dictated by political/cultural/economic, or some other similar bias.
Completely agreed here.
If you want to see what herd immunity looks like, take a look at college campuses where vaccination mandates have resulted in communities with 95-99% vaccination. There are a few breakthrough cases, but they're few and far between and mostly mild to asymptomatic, and transmission is happening almost exclusively in off-campus settings (= bars and frat parties). Compared to last year, colleges and universities with strict vaccine requirements have been more or less Covid free. Boston, MA, for example, has around a 4% positivity rate currently. Harvard, where 97% of faculty, staff and students are vaccinated, has 0.15%.
Looking at college campuses can overstate things and lead to excessive optimism .
We are talking largely of college age students. So they have stronger immune systems and their vaccine immunity might last better than older . And , as younger, they likely did not get vaccinated until at least late spring. And a big bunch probably late summer before school summer. So their vaccine immunity is more recent than most of the USA and schools be still solid.
Wait a few months and you probably will see cases going up on campuses.
Everything we are seeing indicates, to me, that the magic percentage of vaccinated needed to really stop it and reduce cases to nesr zero is nonexistent.
Even 100% vaccinated is simply not enough. It will still spread as breakthrough cases and R will fluctuate around 1.0 , depending on how much recent infections added natural immunity. But if everyone vaccinated, deaths will be greatly reduced.
"Yes, this means that we will probably never eliminate COVID-19 via herd immunity."
I'll push back a little. This may be true with current vaccines. There is talk of a different kind of vaccine, a nasal spray, that triggers an immune response in your nose that would stop the vaccine in its tracks.
The current vaccines keep you alive by not letting the virus grown in your lungs. But it can grow, temporarily, in your nose from where it can spread.
Maybe the future will be kind to us.
Thought exercise: If 100% of the traveling public were vaccinated, transmission would be easier to control with just local transmission addressed via contact tracing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
D_Ohrk
Fair question but not applicable here in the US
But if you step on a train, bus, plane or ship then it becomes fair game.
But we love to drive with our families.
My ONLY problem is that there are way too many variables with COVID. Onset of symptoms, etc vary from person to person. Their overall health etc
The OTHER thing is that the variants have changed our tune on COVID
IF we had had DELTA first, then Alpha, then Beta we'd be endemic now, but we didn't we had 3 variants that lulled us into a false sense of "we beat it".
Now we have over 30 different strains of DELTA alone. When you combine that with waning vaccine immunity you can see why the world is worried about another winter time surge. As I posted the other day they are now talking like 130M people with little to no immunity for whatever reason.
Faucci was correct. The more this virus gets passed from person to person the better the chance of a variant coming along that evades both vaccine, and post infection immunity. This would be an unmitigated disaster.
Think of it this way. The Spanish flu. World population at 1.7B. An American soldier gets it just before he ships out for war. He's on a slow moving transport that takes 5 to 6 days to get to Europe. By the time he gets to Europe he's gotten sick, gotten over it. Today we have 4 TIMES that population and we can fly from the US to Europe in 5 or 6 HOURS then jump on other modes of transport.
The world is a far different place.
But I do believe, like Faucci, and other immunologists etc that a vaccine resistant strain is just around the corner.
Europe will be in a zonal shut down before long. Austria the Netherlands, Germany will have to do something soon. Next will be France and the UK.
And China? Good grief. Their zero case tolerance measures are not working.
It will be next year around this time that we may be looking at a good solid vaccine, OR - the Japanese will have developed a totally new vaccine to address all forms of coronavirus.
That would be wonderful
So, before Thanksgiving, just found out today that both adult children, coming with families, have people at work out now due to COVID exposure. We're all getting tested for the big day, but--??? And we are all vaccinated, boostered, masked in public spaces, super vigilant...and living in relatively "safe" areas with less risk than many others. This is effing crazy-making.
coral
Go ahead and have your family gathering.
Why? Well, if you are all vaccinated AND boostered the risk is low. If anyone doesn't taste the turkey or the apple pie etc - then they probably have COVID. Of course anyone with THIS particular symptom should get tested.
This was THE symptom that told the Mrs and I we had COVID last Christmas. The food was "tasteless".
What IS concerning to scientists is a new variant that evades the protections provided by previous infection and vaccination. THAT is what they are concerned with.
In THAT situation the virus renders the T-cell memory moot and your body will NOT react to the new variant. This would then almost be considered not another wave but actually
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0024790
{snip}
Viruses can avoid detection by both innate and adaptive immune responses. Pattern recognition receptors in infected cells, interferons, dendritic cells, T cell receptors and antibodies are all targets of viral evasion proteins. Viruses can express proteins that directly interfere
And
Viruses avoid detection by pattern recognition receptors, T cell receptors and antibodies by modifying the ligands for these receptors.
Different viruses target every stage of antigen processing and presentation by MHC molecules, thus inhibiting recognition by T cells.
{snip}
If the T-cells DO NOT FUNCTION then we have NO long term protection - we have anitbodies with Alzheimer's so to speak.
So in THIS case, the very things that provide the prevention of SERIOUS symptoms and death are no longer there.
If the new variant is mild? That's a good thing. If it's got a high viral load. That could be bad. More and more people are coming to the conclusion that a immunity evading wave is coming.
We, fortunately have 2 things going for us. First, a world that is cognizant of what is going on, and second, a pharma industry that is already geared up for vaccine production.
I got my 3rd Moderna shot on Saturday and felt shitty for the next 48 hours.
And I now know two people who have had breakthrough infections.
Both caught it from their 10 year who brought it home from his unmasked school.
And that said, I’m still wearing a mask and avoiding crowds.
As sucky as I felt yesterday I wouldn’t want that again. Especially when who the hell knows how long it’s gonna last.
Got my Moderna booster on first day available. Sore arm, nothing else. You know, I could handle all the uncertainty if we weren't facing an onslaught of attacks from GOP vs. vaccines & masks. That is what is making this so hard to endure--the fact that half the country is a bunch of death-wish zombies foisting negativity everywhere.
jharp-
The Mrs & I both got our boosters last week. She developed a small rash and swelling at the injection site and had some soreness. I had no symptoms to speak of. The booster, however is NOT a third shot. The Moderna booster is half the strength of the first two shots - whereas the other vaccines are all FULL STRENGTH but all weaker than Moderna to begin with.
It will be interesting to see how long the immunity lasts.
Nope, your wrong. Why do you think there are less sick yry???? It ain't all vaccines. Try harder. Next fall, it will be even less. See 1889-99 for self education.
Did Disquis once have a Block this user button? Along with an edit button?
Kiner
This is word press NOT disqus
Word Press stinks - Drum knows it - and just plain refuses to change it.
He was VP of a software company at one time, so don't expect HIM to make things easier for US. I'm sure, to him word press is just child's play
In order to discuss " herd immunity " , have to define what it is, and the term is used in many different ways .
One meaning , which kevin seems to be using , is enough immunity that the virus basically goes away permanently or to such low levels that the chance of catching is just minimal. So R goes below 1.0 and stays there permanently, except in specific populations rarely.
That was also the way it was understood by most of the public and they way it was largely portrayed by the cdc.
And it was always largely a fantasy. That almost never happens especially with a virus like covid . It was never at all likely that vaccination alone was going to be enough. I expect the cdc knew that but pushed it early to encourage vaccinations ( backfired !).
But maybe a good vaccination program combined with a good amount of natural immunity from infections ( especially in those unvaccinated) can do much better. Some evidence that hybrid immunity ( both vaccibe and natural ) produces much stronger immunity, including ability to deal with future variants.
Now some seem to be trying to focus on vaccine effectiveness against sickness and death as part of the definition of herd immunity. Which is nonsense. Clearly herd immunity is about your immunity helping to protect others and theirs protecting you . The vaccines ability to prevent sickness is great and might be more long lasting, but zero to do with herd immunity. Herd immunity is all about stopping spread.
The definition of herd immunity I think useful is simply when immunity from either source in the community is sufficient to reduce cases, i.e. when R below 1.0. So that , if that immunity lasted at that level, the virus would eventually be eliminated.
But of course really good immunity does not last forever. That we can see, both natural or vaccine. Clearly no way it can keep R below 1.0.
But , under my definition, we reached herd immunity as a nation twice and some places a third time now like Florida. You could say losing herd immunity was all about a new variant but the evidence shows otherwise. Look at fla now . Cases still lowest in the nation but looks like R might be creeping back above 1.0. Or about to do so, the decline is clearly stalling. And this is with weather helping now unlike most of usa and with decent vaccine and a lot of natural immunity. And WITHOUT a new variant .
In fla , just the weakening of immunity over a few months changed their R from maybe .7 to 1.0.
This is endemic. No way to avoid that .
But the news really might not be that bad as explain next post.
So WHY does immunity go down quickly with covid , specifically natural immunity? Why does the immune system stop making antibodies when it knows how to do so?
If making antibodies for a virus forever was simply a good thing for survival, the innune system would have evolved to do so. But it did not. There is a cost to making antibodies forever for covid , those resources are not then available for other infections which may be more serious.
The fact that natural immunity does fade quickly, at least to the extent that you stop making antibodies ( but retain the memory of how to) indicates that the immune system assessment is that a second covid infection can easily be fought off - that just retaining immune memory is enough - don't need active antibodies.
My feeling from the start in spring 2020 is that covid is NOT that deadly a virus , and flu is probably more deadly . Except that the FIRST time you get it and it is " novel " and only if you are old enough or weak enough even the first time . Covid does replicate fast and can overwhelm an older or weakened immune system before it gets a chance to figure out what it is. But once the immune system gets the antibody figured out, covid is a wimp.
So I expect covid is here to stay and there might be more cases than the flu winter after winter. But less deadly than the flu.
And do not say everyone will just get a covid booster every months for the rest of their life . Not happening.
The covid flu comparison so far was between covid as a novel virus hitting first time and flu where almost all deaths are " breakthrough " cases as we all get the flu as kids. Instead compare covid to flu as a novel virus such as when hit amerindians and could kill 10% of population. Even common cold killed then.
Basically, we're looking at an eventual situation of endemicity (like various forms of the flu) except: A) it'll be more dangerous to blow off your covid shot and B) you'll probably need two a year, instead of just one.
Maybe ten years down the road we'll be able to relax a bit, if the dominant covid strain mostly just gives people a bad cold (like two or three other coronaviruses that are now endemic in our species, but at one point were much more lethal).
I don't write the above in a pessimistic frame of mind: to me we've passed the rubicon of covid "manageability" — I'm seeing lots of ads for cruise lines and various other services that were considered ultra risky (if not outright forbidden) a short while ago.
The main danger at this point is new variants that are either a lot more lethal (unlikely according to my reading, as the virus's evolution begins to bump up against the limits imposed by biology) or (more likely) vaccine resistant.
Justin:
"The main danger at this point is new variants that are either a lot more lethal (unlikely according to my reading, as the virus's evolution begins to bump up against the limits imposed by biology) or (more likely) vaccine resistant."
OK if immunity is reliant on T-cell memory to fight off the most serious symptoms - and THAT T-cell memory is interrupted, masked, or rendered useless then the next wave would NOT have to be more lethal - it could carry the same "lethality" that DELTA+ has and still KILL hundreds of thousands.
The flu morphs into something different each year, but our bodies have either vaccine or post infection immunity to it. Take THAT away (like an immunity evading COVID variant would) and you have a deadly flu season AGAIN.
If COVID morphs into something that evades immunity we have? another NOVEL coronavirus. We are still very early in this virus' "life" whereas with the flu we've been dealing with it for centuries but I'm sure what we are dealing with during this flu season is far FAR different from what it looked like a hundred years ago
The good news is that Delta has just about taken over the world. There are only a couple of non-Delta variants holding out in South America, and they seem to be in slow decline.
And of all the AY.x variants that Delta spawned, most of the new mutations are in the Open Reading Frames (ORFs), especially in ORF1a region of the virus that seems to control viral replication once it gets inside the host cell. The spike protein isn't mutating much, and those AY variants with spike protein mutations are NOT spreading very fast — with the exception of the UK, where AY.4.2 is growing in frequency. Strangely enough AY.4.2 isn't doing well in the rest of the world.
So, it looks like the spike protein including the Furin Cleavage Site (FCS) and the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) has been optimized as much as it can be to facilitate human infection. Some of the AY's with the ORF1a mutations are pushing Delta Classic aside, but not nearly as quickly as Delta shoved Alpha out of the way. I don't think we're going appreciably higher R0 rates with Delta's children.
So that's the good news.
The bad news is that there seem to be ways that SARS-CoV-2 can infect cells — other than the RBD of the spike protein binding to the ACE-2 receptor. Right now they're much much less effective than spike protein trick. But who knows? Evolutionary shit happens.
if immunity is reliant on T-cell memory to fight off the most serious symptoms - and THAT T-cell memory is interrupted, masked, or rendered useless
I am not a scientist, but at least according to some of what I've read, that second part is what's questionable (and hopefully unlikely). Normally, viruses are at least partially "species specific." A virus that has evolved to make an oak tree or nematode ill is unlikely to affect homo sapiens (and vice versa). So, a virus can only evolve so far before it reaches an evolutionary stage where it no longer has the capacity to infect humans and/or make us sick. (In practice, of course, such variants never got off the ground in the first place: they're not able to successfully reproduce and are therefore evolutionary dead-ends).
Folks:
Herd Immunity is a most likely a mirage. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but there are several reasons that we'll be living with COVID-19 for years to come.
1. Durable immunity against SARS-CoV-2 (or for any Coronavirus) is an impossibility with the vaccines and mitigation techniques we have right now. Although the booster may protect us for another six months, a year, or even a couple of years, antibody levels will drop off and we'll see the following scenario...
SARS-CoV-2 makes its initial attack through the mucosal membranes. If one has high anti-body titers post vaccination, one can very likely fight off the attack. But antibodies wane over months or years, And Delta has optimized its attack through that mucosal loophole, by increasing its viral loads quickly and to higher levels than previous variants.
In the meantime it takes about 3 days for memory B and T cells to start manufacturing antibodies to fight off the infection. So, people can still get sick & spread the virus, because Delta vaxxed viral loads are almost as high as unvaxxed loads from pre-Delta variants. Once our memory immune system revs up, it's unlikely that one will end up in hospital, but in the meantime, the infected peep is sneezing and coughing and spreading the virus.
Likewise, immunity derived from a bout of COVID-19 doesn't last either. In low-vax countries we've seen people getting infected with COVID-19 two and even three times. So there will be cyclical outbreaks of COVID-19 for the foreseeable future.
If we look at four types of Coronaviruses that cause common colds, they recirculate through human populations in three-to-five year cycles because people do not develop durable immunity to those types of respiratory CoVs.
2. The only viruses that we've been successful or fairly successful about eradicating are those which don't have reservoirs in animal populations — i.e. smallpox, polio, etc. Coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 can infect all sorts of mammalian species. There are about 20 species whose ACE-2 receptors are almost identical to humans, and there are another 70 or 80 species where the ACE-2 receptors are close enough for SARS-CoV-2 to infect them (among them domestic cattle, White-tail Deer, and house cats). And SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in deer and cats (3 rare snow leopards just died from COVID-19 in a Nebraska zoo!). So, the virus will likely continue to mutate in these animal reservoirs, and new strains will come back to infect us.
3. Even if we were to vaccinate 95% of all human beings, plus give them durable immunity in the process, Delta has a high enough R0 value to continue spreading among that remaining 5 percent. Masks, social distancing, and other public health mitigation strategies will be required for the foreseeable future. Given that 80% of the US population is vaccinated, the chances of the virus getting around masks etc. is very high.
The future?
Nasal vaccines hold some promise of being able to stop SARS-CoV-2 infection it its tracks, thus closing the mucosal membrane loophole. It's not clear if the antibodies they generate will wane. Stanford is working on an injected vaccine that they *claim* will provide durable immunity. I don't know how they propose to get around the way antibodies wane in our bodies. So, I'll believe it when I see it.
Once our memory immune system revs up, it's unlikely that one will end up in hospital, but in the meantime, the infected peep is sneezing and coughing and spreading the virus...If we look at four types of Coronaviruses that cause common colds, they recirculate through human populations in three-to-five year cycles...
Your words here in my view point to the most hopeful scenario: as with any other endemic coronavirus, we can't stop it from infecting people, but it's very rarely fatal.
From what I understand there's compelling evidence that the Russian Flu pandemic of 1889-1891 (the last of the 19th century) was, in fact, a coronavirus. That coronavirus killed millions of people 130 years ago. But is now endemic to our species, and is one of the several that causes common cold.
Here in Maryland, we have 88% of the 18 and over population vaccinated. It's that high because we have a governor (R) who said "just get the damn shot," we have many good healthcare employers (Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, Kaiser, Medstar), and a lot of federal government workers. We have a great state website for data, so I can know the covid rate per 1,000 in my county, (and zip code) as well as the vaccination rate per county. Maryland has done rather well balancing business interests and covid. Most people are wearing masks in grocery stores, some smaller stores still require masks. Restaurants and theaters are open, some requiring vaccination to enter. Our current covid numbers have moved up just a bit. Good news is children getting vaccinated (and masks are required in schools, FYI) and adults getting boosters. The counties that are 50% vaccinated are the "red" counties, and that is where we are seeing the higher percentages. (9.5 per 1,000 by West Virginia instead of 1.9 per 1,000 near Baltimore) Barring a new variant, I think we will keep on perking at this level through the winter.
Kevin, for population immunity you need to look at both vaccination and prior infection. Prior infection is a bit tricky because reported case counts vastly underestimate the actual number of people infected (many are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and never get tested or reported.) But you can do population antibody surveys to estimate the "ascertainment bias." Doing that lets you estimate the % of the population protected via immunity.
Georgia Tech has a calculator here that shows you the path of various states towards immunity under some simplistic assumptions -- pretty good for a first cut, much more so than just looking at vaccination rates.
Upshot: we're probably above 85%, closing in on 90% immunity now. Of course we know that vaccinated and recovered folks do get re-infected, so this isn't complete immunity....
https://popimmunity.biosci.gatech.edu/
WHO is now putting a number on the estimated death expectations in Europe:
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-business-united-nations-denmark-579fe691ceefadd8a205188be52436d7
{snip}
"We can expect that there will be high or extreme stress on hospital beds in 25 countries, and high or extreme stress in intensive care units (ICUs) in 49 out of 53 countries between now and 1 March 2022,” a WHO Europe statement said. “Cumulative reported deaths are projected to reach over 2.2 million by spring next year, based on current trends.”
It said the region could face a cumulative 2 million deaths due to the pandemic by March 1."
{snip}
This is an additional 700,000 deaths and who knows how many more infections
But THAT is Europe
Here in the US:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/child-covid-cases-are-on-the-rise-jumping-32-in-latest-surge/
{snip}
In the week of November 11 to 18, nearly 142,000 children reported getting COVID-19. That's an increase of 32 percent from two weeks ago. Overall, cases of COVID-19 in the US have increased 27 percent in the past two weeks.
Children accounted for just over 25 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the week ending on November 18. However, children make up only about 22 percent of the US population. As more adults have gotten vaccinated, children have made up larger shares of infections. Throughout the whole pandemic, children have made up nearly 17 percent of all cases. Almost 6.8 million children are known to have been infected since the pandemic began.
{snip}
Pediatric cases were rare with native, Alpha and Beta variants.
THIS will wake up some folks
And in Mass
https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/11/23/rising-covid-cases-massachusettts-wastewater-data-ahead-holidays/
{snip}
Dr. David Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at Boston University’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and an attending physician in infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center, said he’s concerned by the data he’s seen in recent weeks.
Last week, the 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts jumped up above 2,000 for the first time since February, when most of the state’s residents were unvaccinated. The state’s average percent positivity rate is now 3.07 percent, a level that also hasn’t been seen since early February.
In addition, levels of COVID-19 in Boston-area wastewater, which has been shown to be an early predictor for new infections, have ticked up.
The upward trend looks very similar to increases seen last holiday season, according to Dr. Paul Sax, an infectious diseases doctor at Brigham and Women’s hospital, who is urging the public to protect themselves and others by getting vaccinated if they haven’t already and for seeking out booster shots if eligible.
“Don’t delay,” he wrote on Twitter.
{snip}
Be thankful if you have received your booster