COVID Convoy

Posted on by Thor

COVID Omicron cases in Canada are coming down but they are still higher than any previous wave of the pandemic. Deaths peaked around January 29, 2022 but are still higher that the second and third waves of the Pandemic.Those numbers of course pale to the over 900,000 who have died in America.

Canadians are done with COVID but COVID is not done with them. The virus can not be wished away with the notion of individual freedom.

The “Freedom Convoy“, a large protest in Ottawa, Ontario, that began with truck drivers opposing a cross-border vaccine mandate continues to snarl traffic and disrupt everyday life in the Canadian capital more than a week after it began.

Ottowa is now under a state of emergency. On February 7, 2022, some drivers blocked traffic on the Ambassador Bridge, a key crossing between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, CBC reported. They also got the backing of more than 100 Alaska truck drivers who rallied in support of the convoy, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

Some protesters say they’re staying until all public health mandates are lifted, while others have called for the dissolution of the current government, as NPR‘s Emma Jacobs reported. In addition, signs for QAnon, right-wing militias and Confederate and Nazi flags have also appeared among the protesters, Jacobs said. Ottawa police made several arrests over the weekend, seized fuel from some protesters and issued more than 450 tickets. A judge ruled that truckers couldn’t sound their thunderous horns for 10 days.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who is recovering from COVID-19, has said that engaging the military in response to the protests is “not in the cards right now.”

Bail

Posted on by Thor

10,000 Americans died from COVID-19 last week. Over 860,000 Americans have died so far which is three times the number of casualties from World War II. 10000 deaths are like experiencing 3 to 4 devastating plane crashes every day, for the month, with about 90 people dying in each crash.

Despite this 25% of Americans refuse to get a life saving vaccine. Some journalist on the Bill Mayer show pronounced that she is done with COVID. She used to spray the Pringles cans, (who actually eats Pringles?) She stripped her clothes off fearing COVID might be on her clothes. She thought that when she got the vaccine life would return to normal. Now, she is over it.

She is of the new group of Americans that fit into the “Vaxed and Done” camp.” She is inconvenienced and only thinks of herself.  She really isn’t thinking about the true sacrifices of doctors and nurses all across America who are burnt out from having to watch so many people needlessly die.

Media like to point out that Omicron is less deadly than Delta. In the case of the original strain of COVID, if there are 10,ooo infections, and each patient then infects 1.1 other people, and of those 0.8% might result in death, in one months time you might expect 129 deaths. If the virus is more deadly like Delta then the number of deaths might rise to 193 in a month. If the virus is 50% more contagious like Omicron then in that case there would be 978 deaths.

The virus is controllable with simple masking, distancing and vaccines. However many Americans consider this an inconvenience. America has proven incapable of rationally responding as a society. 1 out of every 375 Americans has died from COVID and they continue to do so. a mask is 25 cents and the vaccine is free, yet that is a bride too far. Another 50,000 to 300,000 Americans will die from COVID by March 2023.

Doctors and nurses are trying to bail out the life boat while others not only refuse to bail but are actively trying to sink the boat.

William Cranshaw wrote in 1625, “Abhor more that poison wicked opinions that the pestilence us not infectious, that each can do whatever he wants, that avoiding persons and places, and diligent use of means for preservation, are needless and of no use…”

The Peak?

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Hospitalizations in the United States may have peaked, the highest day being January 14, 2022 with almost 152,000 Americans hospitalized for COVID-19. Actually, I wrote that hopeful first sentence yesterday and, I was dead wrong, the number of hospitalizations has slipped even higher. We may not be at the peak yet, but hopefully soon.  As of January  18, 2022 over 153,000 Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19. More people are hospitalized with COVID-19 now than at any other time in the pandemic.

Some think that hitting the peak would mean that we are in the clear. However that is NOT the case. If the downward slope is more gradual that the initial ascent, then you can see more cases and death through out the decline than you saw during the rise. More people die as after reaching the peak of Everest that on the ascent to the peak.

America is seeing way more hospitalizations than any other developed country. This is likely because vaccination rates are so low in America. Our World in Data reported that of all the countries included in its analysis, the U.S. has the lowest proportion of its population that is fully vaccinated and also the lowest rate of booster shots administered.

“Overall, a smaller percentage of reported cases were hospitalized compared to the Delta wave (about 2% versus about 5%), but there were more total hospitalizations due to significantly greater case numbers,” a report by New York City’s health department concluded last week.

Another problem is that the Omicron variant hit America as we were still in the midst of a huge Delta spike. Thankfully Omicron displaced Delta, infecting far more people while being a bit less deadly.

The Omicron variant is less likely to lead to hospitalization than other variants, data suggests, but it’s so transmissible that hospitalizations are spiking anyway because so many people are being infected all at once.The hope is that the numbers will drop as fast as they spiked upwards to reach this peak. Those unvacinated who survive will have some level of immunity going forward. Those who were fully vaccinated and boosted who also get infected may develop “super immunity.”

Military Cases Triple

Posted on by Thor

COVID-19 cases in the United States have surged almost three-fold in the military since just before Christmas of 2021 according to defense department statistics. The Defense Department reported just under 5,300 cases among service members December 22, 2021. By January 5, 2022 that number reached more than 13,900.

As of September 1, 2021 there were 40 military member deaths due to COVID-19. By January 5, 2022 the total was 86. In response, the military is increasing health protection protocols on many bases and at the pentagon.

Wright Patterson Air Force Base has moved to the highest level of health protection measures which includes now allowing only 15% of the workforce in the office at a time.

One base that has seen a post holiday surge is Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which currently has an estimated 50% positivity rate among those being tested. The base hospital, Womack Army Medical Center, was at 100% capacity at the end of last week, a military official there told CNN.

The jump reflects, to some extent, what is happening in civilian society as the Omicron variant has taken hold and case rates have risen in many communities across the country, defense officials say. The Defense Department does not test specifically for the Omicron variant but officials say there is every reason to believe the highly contagious variant has hit the military force.

Of Mice and Omicron

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Where did Omicron come from? Researchers created a sort of family tree which shows how the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants branched off of the original Wuhan strain of the virus (B1.1).

The Omicron variant seemed to appear out of nowhere with 45 mutations to the spike proteins. It has mutations that are not found in all prior variants. It is on a completely different lineage of the tree with a long line of mysterious unknown development.

It was first identified in South Africa on November 24, 2021. It is believed to have diverged from the B1.1 line in mid 2020. Where has it been since then? Mutations to the virus normally happen at about 0.5 per month. Omicron had 45 mutations in the spike protein. Over 18 months when Omicron was hidden from view, it developed mutations 3,5 times faster than other variants.

So where was Omicron during these 18 months and why were the mutations happening so fast?

  • It might have spread in a population with low levels of testing and not been found. This is unlikely.
  • It might have developed in a person who was chronically infected. One theory was that it might have developed in someone with HIV.
  • It might have developed mutations in a non-human host and then jumped back to humans. We don’t test animals for COVID, so could have gone undetected.

A pier reviewed paper out of China explored this third possibility. The likely culprit is mice. The mutations that developed were significantly different that those that developed in humans. The mutations that develop in mice are similar to the mutations that developed in Omicron. The mutations allow the virus to fit well into mice cell receptors.

The idea is that airborne Omicron jumped from a humans into mice, the virus developed mutations that allowed it to better infect mice, then the virus jumped back into humans. This would be an inter-species evolutionary trajectory of the outbreak. This could explain why this virus can cause so many breakthrough infections in humans. Thankfully the Omicron virus causes an increased infection in the airways and not as much infection in human lungs. This may result in milder cases of disease. It will spread wildly throughout humanity with hopefully less death while offering some increased immunity for anyone infected. It could be a blessing in disguise by acting like a vaccine for the unvaccinated.

However we need to vaccinate as many people as possible around the world to avoid future mutations. We can not “boost” out way out of the pandemic. We might not be as lucky next time around.

Will COVID Become a Common Childhood Disease?

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As Omicron infects everyone in the world, it will offer some immunity to Delta and possibly future variants of COVID-19. It will find everyone who is unvaccinated and infect them. We do not know yet how hard the virus will hit the unvaccinated. I follow hospitalizations and they are rising daily but not as fast as the daily case numbers, of which there were one million new cases in one day in America on January 3, 2022. That is truly astonishing.

With everyone becoming infected all at once, the hospitals will become overwhelmed. Healthcare workers are already angry. May have resigned preferring not to deal with the stupidity of so much needless death.

Those that are fully vaccinated and boosted are only 40% protected from also being infected. The good thing is that the vaccine still does protect against severe infection and death. The U.S. government counted many shots of vaccine as first doses that were actually second doses or booster shots. Adjusting for these discrepancies. about 61.3% of Americans are now fully vaccinated and only 30% of those have been boosted.That leaves plenty of people wide open to infection.

Healthline reported that, new research suggests that as COVID-19 becomes endemic across the world, it could become as prevalent as the common cold and would affect mostly children who will not have been vaccinated or exposed to the virus yet. While this sounds frightening the researchers clarify that children are far less likely to have severe symptoms related to COVID-19. As a result, the overall effects of the disease will be lessened. The study was published in the journal Science Advances this month.  “It was the conclusion of these researchers that COVID-19 will do what other epidemic respiratory viruses have done in the past, which is to transition to a routine, seasonal infection, and involve young children more than others,” Dr. Michael Grosso said.

Welcome Back

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Florida Governor Ron DeathSantis has vowed that schools will remain open through the Omicron blizzard. Mask mandates for students are a thing of the past since DeathSantis created a law making mask mandates illegal to protect students.

The Governor has been at war with local school districts that wanted to mask mandates to protect students during surges of COVID. The  administration’s policy was to deny school boards, the right to choose whether their children attend school masked or unmasked.

The State Board of Education docked pay from school boards that issued mask mandates in defiance of the governor’s policy. The Federal Government stepped in to cover School Board salaries. However, it is now illegal to protect the lives of students. The Governor wants students to get infected in the  hope that it will foster herd immunity with what he considers an acceptable amount of death. COVID is not benign in in kids and it is not inconsequential.

So students are returning to classrooms mask free if they like, to spread this highly transmissible virus at will. Governor DeathSantis said, while speaking in Fort Lauderdale, children “do not need to be doing any crazy mitigation” such as testing or wearing masks, unless their parents want them to. He is also making moved to cut back testing just as the demand for more testing has grown in this wave of the pandemic. Tests  will only be for “High Value” individuals, whatever that means. An example given was of an elderly grandmother given more testing consideration over an 8-year-old third grader. Clearly he feels that allowing children to get sick will held his re-election plans

According to The New York Times, “Large city school systems in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Newark have joined a growing list of public schools across the country that have postponed reopening after the holiday break, switched to remote instruction, or have taken both steps because of COVID-19 outbreaks and staffing shortages.”

Florida reported 85,000 new COVID-19 cases on January 4th 2022. 61 people died that same day. Hospitalizations have spiked suddenly high above the peak of the Delta wave. It will get worse before it gets better. As of 6Pm on January 3, 2022 over 3,000 schools nationwide had closed for the week, according to Burbio, which tracks school calendars. Many schools are pivoting to virtual learning.  School districts in and around  Detroit, Atlanta, Newark, New Jersey, and Milwaukee, as well as individual schools elsewhere, have reverted to virtual learning for days or weeks, mostly because of staff shortages resulting from illness or quarantine.

The Gadget

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The “Gadget” was the plutonium device detonated at the Trinity Test site in July 1945. Manhattan Project scientists had to overcome difficult scientific and engineering challenges to design and build the Gadget. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.

The Gadget was much larger than the COVID-19 virus but its deadly impact has been very much the same. Over 5 million people have died fro COVID-19 world wide and America leads the world in the number of deaths with over 800,000.

Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki about 199,000 died. A 2016 study concluded that, in the United States’ nuclear weapons plants since 1945, some 107,394 American workers contracted cancer and other serious diseases, and 33,480 of these workers have died as a result. People continue to die from something that they can not see and therefor do not believe.

Omicron is spreading as fast as a nuclear explosion. Omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant. This means the infected person can breath out the virus much easier than if it settled deep inn the lungs. That allows that person to infect many others while perhaps being asymptomatic. “Strikingly, Omicron was 4-fold more infectious than wild type [the original version of the virus] and 2-fold more infectious than Delta,” Garcia-Beltran and colleagues wrote in their study.

In one case two fully vaccinated people were isolating in a hotel across the hall from each other. Each tested negative prior to isolation. Neither person left their room and yet they both became infected with Omicron. It is believed that the brief moment hotel staff opened one door and then the other to deliver food was when the virus spread from one person to the other across the hall. It may take less of the airborne partials to start an infection. It is more important than ever to wear a well fit KN-95 mask and to stay further than six feet from others indoors and out. January will result in an amazing nuclear wave of infection.

Santa Shortage

Posted on by Thor

Have you been desperate to have your child photographed with Santa this year? Well CNN reported that Santa is fully booked through the Omicron season. The number of trained and available Santas has gone down, which is  another disruption in the supply chain caused by the pandemic.

There are 10% fewer Santas available this year while requests for Santas have more than doubled when compared to pre-pandemic levels.

The problem is that Santa schools are seeing less enrollment. Santa trainees don’t want to travel to the indoor school settings or sit in crowded Santa conferences. Just like health care workers around the country, experienced long time Santas are retiring their red coats. 18% are taking 2021 off.

Being over weight and over 60 years old, Santa is at a high risk category when it comes to getting COVID-19. More than 335 Santa’s have died this year from coronavirus and other ailments, according to Mitch Allen of Hire Santa. Santas these days must show proof of vaccination, and he must take coronavirus rapid test twice a week. Some Santas are fearful of the potentially infested children. With the Omicron variant more children are being infected and requiring hospitalization.

The obvious solution is to have Krampus sit in. He might bite, scratch and breath COVID on your scamp but think of the photo opportunity. Krampus doesn’t give a crap about his own health or anyone else’s health. If your child has not been good, Krampus had the solution.

Omicron Blitz

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Omicron is “the most significant threat” to public health in the U.K., authorities warned on December 15, 2021, as the WHO cautioned that the highly contagious Covid-19 variant was spreading at an unprecedented rate.

The number of Covid-19 infections over the coming days will be “quite staggering” compared to previous variants, said Jenny Harries, the head of the U.K. Health Security Agency.

England has entered a wartime stance against the advancing Omicron variant.  The country reported a record number (78,610) of new daily Covid-19 cases on December 15, 2021. This surpassed the previous high of 68,053 cases reported on January 8, 2021.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that Britain faces a “tidal wave” of omicron infections, and has announced that England would be speeding up its booster program to offer all adults a third dose of a vaccine by the end of the year.

Long lines have been seen outside vaccination centers in many U.K. cities and towns with the government putting its booster program on overdrive to try to get a third vaccine shot to as many people as possible.

Johnson confirmed on December 13, 2021 that at least one patient infected with the new omicron variant had died in the country. It was the first publicly confirmed death globally from the new heavily mutated strain. Some restrictions, including mask mandates in shops and instructions to work from home where possible, have been reintroduced in England throughout December 2021. France imposed a travel ban on U.K. travelers. The United States will be following the U.K. in two to three weeks. Omicron is already prevalent in Orange County waste water meaning it is spreading Central Florida.

Professor Shabir Madhi, a leading vaccinologist, said that Omicron is NOT less virulent than Delta but deaths have been 10 times less in South Africa. This may be because so many people (73%) had prior infections resulting in some immunity. Discovery Health of South Africa reported on a study of 3.7 million people from the first thee weeks of the Omicron outbreak. Omicron now accounts for 90% of the cases having displaced Delta. Omicron has peaked faster than any other variant of COVID-19.

Two doses of Pfizer Bio-NTech now only offer 33% protection against infection. Cases however are mild when infection occurs. The two doses of Pfizer offer 70% protection against hospitalization. Booster doses should bring immunity levels back up  to 90%. For someone with a prior infection of COVID there is a 40% risk of re-infection.If you are unvaccinated, then you are screwed. The virus will find you.

In South Africa the chance of hospitalization with Omicron is 29% lower than Delta. There is less of chance of intensive care admission. Children under the age of 18 have a 20% higher risk of admission. There is also an increase of admissions for children under the age of 5. Most children presented with mild symptoms such as sore throat, nasal congestion, headache, and a fever that resolved in two or three days.