LOL, CDC admits its withheld COVID data could be "misinterpreted" to mean the vaccines aren't effective

CDC still can't face the truth about Provincetown, so don't get your hopes up.

The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects :

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said. ...

Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status.

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years. ...

“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021.

In Massachusetts breakthrough deaths must represent a shocking 25.5% of confirmed deaths since March 7, 2021

Cumulative confirmed deaths since the beginning of the pandemic: 20,884

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting

Breakthrough deaths: 1,224 (5.86% of confirmed deaths to date)

https://www.mass.gov/doc/weekly-report-covid-19-cases-in-vaccinated-individuals-january-18-2022/download

Cumulative confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic: 1,418,149

Breakthrough cases: 348,510 (24.57% of confirmed cases to date)

Breakthrough hospitalizations: 5,437 (0.38% of all confirmed cases to date; cumulative hospitalization data is not available from Massachusetts)

Presenting the data this way, however, leads to mixing the breakthrough data with the data from the first year of the pandemic when there were no vaccines through which to break.

We have to subtract the first year data to see what is really going on since vaccinations began and were characteristic of the second year.

A convenient date to choose for the end of the first year is March 7, 2021, when The Covid Tracking Project ceased its pandemic data gathering efforts. That data helpfully included cumulative hospitalization numbers. And fewer than 10% of Massachusetts residents had been fully vaccinated by that date.

In the first year of the pandemic through March 7, 2021, Massachusetts had 16,085 confirmed deaths, 559,083 confirmed cases, and 19,713 ever hospitalized for COVID.  

The hospitalization rate in the first year was therefore 3.525% of confirmed cases, slightly higher than the national rate in the first year of the pandemic at 3.06%.

This means in year two to date since March 7, 2021 there have been only 4,799 additional confirmed deaths, but 859,066 additional confirmed cases and approximately 30,282 additional hospitalizations (I used the first year hospitalization rate of 3.525% as a proxy for this, which I grant is only an educated guess).

From those baseline figures from the second year of the pandemic to date, we get the following rates for breakthroughs since March 7, 2021 using the breakthrough data Massachusetts helpfully reports unlike most states:

Breakthrough deaths: 25.50%

Breakthrough cases: 40.56%

Breakthrough hospitalizations: ~17.95%.

In Massachusetts, the proportion of serious outcomes for vaccinated  people is much higher than people realize. This is certainly true for deaths.

Coronavirus virulence since the India variant became dominant in the US is actually running below the first year average

News reports in early July declared the India variant to be dominant in the United States.

From July 6-August 6 total announced cases per the New York Times data have grown by 1.97 million.

But during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, dated roughly from March 7, 2020 to March 7, 2021 (when The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic stopped collecting data), total announced cases averaged 2.42 million per month over the entire twelve month period.

What is more, since March 7, 2021 total announced cases are averaging an even lower 1.34 million per month to August 6 (five months), which includes the new period of the India variant.

 

So the India variant is really going to have to outperform from here on out to prove the claim by the authorities that the India variant is much more virulent, much more transmissible, et cetera. It is going to have to produce many more millions of cases per month than it is doing in order to do it. They have 7 more months, because that's how these things must be measured to be meaningful (disease morbidity is measured in cases per 100,000 per year). 

But this far at least, the India variant isn't living up to the hype, from either side, which includes the Buck Sextons and Alex Berensons of the world who keep insisting on the basis of specious antibody testing that far more people have been exposed than the case counts show and that natural immunity is widespread.

US COVID-19 update through Feb 2021

Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.

Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.

Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized. 

The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that.  We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out. 

Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.

Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.

Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated. 

It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.

  

LOL, The Atlantic has declared the pandemic over and will stop collecting data on March 7, 2021

It's good to be a Democrat.

Meanwhile through Feb 20 2,802 people in the US have died of COVID-19 every single damn day in February, the second highest daily death rate measured monthly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Everyone thinks the recent big drop in cases means it's over? What a joke.

New cases in Feb just through 2/20 total 1.873 million, far exceeding May 2020's 1.799 million. The country went into SHUT DOWN mode with far fewer new cases in March 2020: 188,461. In April when so many Americans perished there were just 1.075 million new cases.

It's way too early to stop collecting data, unless of course you have an axe to grind, like the neo-cons did when Goldberg at The Atlantic insisted Iraq had WMD.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.