Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

That's good news, though it may speak to how carefree the rest of the population is, because overall hospitalizations are still going up, even with the old folks dropping out of the equation. About 330 Covid patients in the hospital here in Orange County, despite 1 in 4 fully vaccinated.

Ohio is reporting decline first vaccines given. High was 101,000 on March 31st. Earlier this week it was 30,000. Some vaccine providers are asking the state to hold next weeks shipments because they still have doses left. State is looking to expand providers (including primary care physicians -- but that won't help much with reaching younger people -- I went about 15 years after college without seeing a doctor). State is pretty much looking for anyone right now who thinks they can reach people who are not vaccinated.

About 38% of the state has had one shot and about 27.5% of residents are fully vaccinated.

On Weds, State reported incidence rate of 200/100k residents (over 2 week period). Last week it was 183.7. 50/100k will lift health orders.

Apparently Dewine is considering other metrics to remove mandates in Ohio:

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2021/04/gov-mike-dewine-looking-at-c...evels.html

The main one being vaccine numbers. It's a brief mention, and I don't think Dewine ever mentioned a specific percentage.

As far as I can tell, this is the first serious talk of using getting the vaccine as the carrot at the end of the stick. The way to get the case/100,000 down is through getting more vaccines, and more vaccines is the real goal anyway, so why not just us that as the incentive to get rid of mandates?

Second (Pfizer) dose for us two days ago; a little rough yesterday but feelin' fine today.

Several Ohio locations announced this week that they will take anyone, anytime with walk in appointments available.
Giant Eagle, who held a vaccination clinic, and Ohio State are two that I heard of.
38% with a first shot doesn’t seem like enough to me. I’d think by now more would have participated.

Does it sound better if it's nearly 50% with a first dose?

That's what this article reports; it's 38% if you just use the entire population, but 47% if you only include 16 and up.

Given that people younger than that can't even get it at this point, it might be a better indicator of where we are at, with a certain (most likely the majority) of those folks due for a second shot within the next two weeks.

Yeah, the NYT has started showing the vaccination percentages for one and fully vaccinated for a bit now, both nationally and down to the county level if the data is available. So if we assume that everyone who gets the first finishes, then nationally we're slowly closing in on 50%. Since that includes the entire population, including children, that's good-ish. But the ranks slowing already, and especially when the floodgates are opening, that's not so great.

So, can we just open back up?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/23/mit-researchers-say-youre-no-safer-...ource=digg

I feel like I remember Dave saying something exactly to this point some time ago, anyway maybe we should be governing the country instead of the supposed experts.

Ohio's goalpost number dropped from 200 to 185.8 yesterday, so things are moving in the right direction. Also, the State is looking at a 14-day average, which to me looks like it's delayed about a week from reality; I find the 7-day average plots a curve which very closely matches the daily numbers while smoothing out the day-of-week effects; if you scroll back enough, I am keeping that graphic somewhat updated.

Ohio's vaccination dashboard shows vaccinations as a percentage of the population for each age group, as well as a raw dose count. Looking at vaccine starts (which I presume includes vaccine completions) we're above 50% for all age groups 50+, and over 73% for 65+. 50-59 is the largest age group in terms of vaccines administered, followed closely by the 40somethings and 30somethings.

I wonder how much the State is now battling vaccine hesitancy, and how much they're battling bullfuvg-hesitancy: when the vaccine rolled out we all heard (and experienced) the horror shows that were the appointment reservation websites, where you had to make multiple appointments on disconnected systems that would then tell you that you couldn't schedule because nothing was available in the next hour...now there are no-appointment options out there but I don't hear anything promoting how *easily* one can get the shot now. And I think the thought of time-wasting nonsense might be more of a deterrent than any distaste* for the vaccine. A lot of, "Well, I'll get one next time I see my doctor; it will be easy by then..." thinking.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

*It goes in your arm, You can't taste it.
--DCAjr.

That's kind of dumb. The distance independent of duration is irrelevant. I keep seeing arguments like this that narrow on one dimension, where someone then claims victory for being right.

TheMillenniumRider, I think the closest I came to talking about that was in the idea that time spent in proximity is the single biggest risk factor in a random population...my argument being that if you have 36 people on a coaster all facing the same direction, outdoors, with free flowing air (possible air speeds in excess of 60 MPH!) you have a low risk situation even with people sitting closer together, compared with 200 people facing in random directions and standing in a queue house for half an hour. The argument being that you can reduce the exposure risk for the people in the higher risk environment (the queue house) by keeping them there for a shorter period of time, by fully loading the train and thus keeping the line moving.

What bothers me about this research is what you do with the headline. If you are no safer at 60' than you are at 6' , and you are no safer at 6' than you are at 6", what do you do with that? Do you turn on the fans, recognize that the real world experience is that public spaces are a lower risk than we might expect, and open it all up? Or do you take this as evidence that no indoor space is safe, even with 6' of space, and *close* everything again?

--Dave Althoff, Jr. (who points out that the contagious people represent 0.3637% of the population today; that's 1:275, while vaccinated people are more like 1:3...)

RideMan said:

Do you turn on the fans, recognize that the real world experience is that public spaces are a lower risk than we might expect, and open it all up? Or do you take this as evidence that no indoor space is safe, even with 6' of space, and *close* everything again?

Because many people look at this subjectively, you'll have people arguing in favor of both sides of this slider.

It's good that we're making progress here, but if you wanna see what happens when things go really poorly, look at India right now. Hospitals run out of oxygen and they lose 20 people over night. Infection is so bad in some places that they don't need formal lockdown orders, people are understandably scared to go outside.

I am learning so much about hospital oxygen as a result of this thing. First I find out that US hospitals are piping bottled oxygen to the patient rooms which has me wondering why they don’t have industrial size oxygen concentrators like the ones COPD patients carry around.
Then I find out a hospital in India is using such a system, but when it catches fire and fails, it kills 24 patients.
I am also surprised that India, as one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, took so long to get to this point in its COVID-19 epidemic.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

I don't think India has been accurately tracking cases. Since the beginning. Large percentage of deaths (pre-covid) have no cause of death listed. Not saying they are making stuff up or being fraudulent, just don't have the ability to track.

Well, what they do know is that the Italy-in-February-2020 level of hospital overload is a relatively recent development. I don't know if this is a resurgence to those levels, or if this is new for them, but what little I have seen (note that I'm not actively looking for it) implies that it hasn't been this bad before. But then India was so locked-down last Spring that there was actually a noticeable reduction in spam phone calls for a while.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

At some point the United States needs to release its vaccine supply and start actively aiding other nations in controlling the spread of the virus. (This will, of course, cause an unbelievable s-storm, probably mostly from the same people who have been defending "freedom" for the past few months.)

Looking at it only from the perspective of self-interest: there has been a lot of talk about slowing infection rates to prevent new mutations. It's nice if we can do that in the US, but if mutations keep happening elsewhere they're eventually going to make their way here - unless you want to prohibit international travel for the next two to three years.

Beyond that, we've got a pretty heavy dependence on India for all sorts of activities. We're starting to see impacts in our IT department where I work. It's not crippling if some of our projects get delayed, but if a major bank's funds transfer system fails and half the team who can fix it are quarantining, that's going to be a problem. And that's just the first one that comes to mind; I'm sure there are more.

But beyond those reasons, I would hope one would look at photographs and say "we've got to help."

Totally true. Most of the African continent has barely made a dent with vaccinations.

The latest curveball, what they're seeing in Michigan, is a lot of people in their 30's and 40's being hospitalized right now. The more contagious variants are also more likely to kill you apparently. The risk is still lower for younger people, but when the infection rates get so high, it proportionately results in higher numbers of people checking in to the hospital.

I know a surprising number of people who exercise not even basic caution at this point, and aren't vaccinated. I don't get it. I mean, vaccination is free, readily available and insanely effective.

On the flip side:

COVID cases are suddenly falling in 4 hard-hit Northeastern states.

Pay close attention to what’s happening in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Triggered by reopenings and fueled by the rise of more contagious variants, COVID numbers suddenly shot up across all four states last month. But then, just as suddenly, cases began to plummet right at the start of April — and they’re still plummeting today, even as restrictions are being lifted.

“I do think this pattern is significant, and the leading factor is the combination of natural immunity from infection and vaccine-induced immunity,” says Yahoo News Medical Contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, a Brookings Institution health scholar and a primary care internist. “Between the two, you’re starting to cover the majority of the population in these states. We’re progressing toward herd immunity kind of by hook or crook.”

The stats are suggestive. The daily average of new COVID-19 cases increased by 79 percent in New York during the last week of March. In New Jersey, it increased by 59 percent between Feb. 21 and April 1. In Connecticut, it increased by 99 percent over the last three weeks of March. And in Massachusetts, it increased by 64 percent over the same period.

Yet since the start of April, average daily cases have declined by 46 percent in New York, 29 percent in New Jersey, 30 percent in Massachusetts and 40 percent in Connecticut — even as rules on bars, restaurants, movie theaters and other businesses have been getting looser and looser.

Testing across all four states, meanwhile, has hovered around the same level for months, suggesting that the actual number of infections is falling, as opposed to just the number of infections being detected.

Those states did have similar spikes in late March, and they've also largely led the way in vaccinations, all nearly 50% for one dose, 30%+ for complete. I wonder what that inverse curve looks like, and where it levels off if some percentage of people opt not to get pricked. I might not care if it weren't for kids being at least six months out, but you know, for the children.

I am a little annoyed in my daily analysis that at least in Ohio we get vaccination numbers and percentages for various age groups, and for the total population. What we don't get is a percentage for the total eligible (16+) population. I suppose I could run the percentages backwards and get totals for each age group, but I really don't want to work that hard...!

Anyway, those Northeastern stats mirror almost exactly what I have been watching in Ohio. In January and February the case numbers dropped in an almost linear fashion, then during early March the daily numbers became absolutely pancake-flat. I had expected the the curve to go asymptotic, not to flatten at 1,200 cases per day!

Well, as time went on a whole lot of new cases showed up, and got back-dated into March. It turns out that all that time I was complaining about the case rate having flattened, it was actually rising. It now appears that case rates peaked again on Easter Monday, and have been declining in a nearly linear fashion...a curve that looks a lot like February...ever since. Our Spring bounce wasn't nearly as big as the Northeastern States reported, but it most definitely happened. I can't think of anything that explains why it happened, or why it ended. Now, we just hit a pessimistic "odds of meeting an infected person" of 1:300, which means our statewide active case count is the lowest it has been since October 5, 2020.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.