It's Not Over: COVID-19 Cases Are On The Rise Again In US
Last edited Fri Apr 15, 2022, 02:47 PM - Edit history (2)
Source: AP News
(40 mins ago). Yet again, the U.S. is trudging into what could be another COVID-19 surge, with cases rising nationally and in most states after a two-month decline. One big unknown? "We don't know how high that mountain's gonna grow," said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.
No one expects a peak nearly as high as the last one, when the contagious omicron version of the coronavirus ripped through the population. But experts warn that the coming wave - caused by a mutant called BA.2 that's thought to be about 30% more contagious - will wash across the nation.
They worry that hospitalizations, which are already ticking up in some parts of the Northeast, will rise in a growing number of states in the coming weeks. And the case wave will be bigger than it looks, they say, because reported numbers are vast undercounts as more people test at home without reporting their infections or skip testing altogether.
At the height of the previous omicron surge, reported daily cases reached into the hundreds of thousands. As of Thursday, the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases rose to 39,521, up from 30,724 two weeks earlier, according to data from Johns Hopkins collected by The Associated Press...
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-infectious-diseases-4b298e5339d399572e8f70bec118bde0
** NPR, April 14, 2022: 2 New Omicron Variants Are Spreading In N.Y. and Elsewhere. Here's what we know.
On Wednesday, health officials in New York said that two new omicron variants are spreading rapidly in the state. The variants appear to be causing a small surge in cases in central New York state, the department of health said. Known as BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1, the variants are closely related to the BA.2 variant - a version of omicron that has caused surges across Europe and is now dominant across the U.S. Together the two new variants now comprise 90% of cases in central New York. But one of them, BA.2.12.1, contains a mutation that appears to give the variant an advantage, computational biologist Cornelius Roemer wrote on Twitter.
The mutation resides on the part of the virus that binds to human cells. And in previous variants, this mutation has helped the virus infect cells, studies have found. The BA.2.12. variant appears to have a growth advantage of about 30% to 90% per week over BA.2, Roemer estimates. "It looks like [the variant] has an advantage ... It has certainly rapidly grown in some places," epidemiologist William Hanage, at Harvard University, wrote in an email to NPR. Some of the variants' mutations could help the virus evade the immune system, he notes...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/04/14/1092812456/two-new-omicron-variants-are-spreading-in-n-y-and-elsewhere-heres-what-we-know
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/14/ba2-variant-covid-cases-us-rise-north-east-omicron
- Customers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the coronavirus as they shop at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, Feb. 16, 2022. COVID cases are starting to rise again in the US, with numbers up in most states and up steeply in several.
One expert says he expects more of a "bump" than the monstrous surge of the first omicron wave, but another says it's unclear how high the curve will rise and it may be more like a hill.
- Travelers at Chicago Airport.
= new reply since forum marked as read
If we have to get a 4th booster, fuck it! Give it to me! 
won't test because of the cost. 
are just outside of Philly (actually not far from where I live which is near the border of a suburban county).
The media, in article after article after article, is literally "shaming" the city for taking early mitigation steps to keep what could be "a huge spike" down to (hopefully) "a smaller hill".
This is false. NYC implemented a mask mandate and other NPIs in April 2020, and still saw a rise in cases in the Fall and Winters of both 2020 and 2021. Shows that the virus is seasonal and masks have nothing to do with drops in cases.
A lot of states completely abandoned masks and other NPIs as early as 2020. It would have pretty easy to set up a RCT to measure infection rates of the maskless states vs. the masked states. You could easily select a control group from any of the maskless states and compare their infection rates with the masked mandated states. The chart below shows that there was no difference between the masked and unmasked states.
And the same nonsense that suggests that "it's done" or "it's now 'endemic'" keeps happening over and over. 
This is why Philly put the mask mandate back (it technically won't be in effect until April 18th to give businesses time to dig out their signs).
On April 4th, Philly was reporting an "average of 94 cases per day". As of yesterday (10 days later), it is now up to an "average of 183 cases per day", which is a 100% increase. And these are PCR confirms in order to be counted as "a case". Last month just as the city dropped the earlier mask mandate, we had leveled off to about the upper 50 cases per day. Now we're rapidly approaching 200 - 300 cases per day.
On April 4th, the hospitalizations (which for the millionth time, are a lagging indicator) were at 48. As of yesterday 10 days later, they were up to 72 (and that was after hospitalizations had been sitting at ~44- 46 just this past Monday).
And finally last month at our lowest, the positivity bottomed out to ~2%. Now the current positivity is just shy of 8% as of yesterday.
although I don't expect the same rate of increase that occurred with Delta and the original Omicron waves because health officials embraced the "throw off your masks and hug your grandkids" nonsense that happened May 2021, but finally put in a mask mandate in August 2021 when it was obvious that Delta was here -
Link to tweet
@PhiladelphiaGov
Beginning, August 12, masks are required in Philadelphia if you are indoors (unless proof of vaccination is required for entry) and at non-seated outdoor events with 1,000+ attendees.
Learn more ➡️http://ow.ly/G3Oa50FOWA1
Image
12:10 PM · Aug 11, 2021
And as Delta was ravaging the city, Omicron was on its tail through the fall and winter (and holidays), and by then, it was too late.
Hopefully doing this "early" plus having vaccinations (and boosts) in place, as well as a move into spring/summer (and more outdoors activities vs indoors), will help to mitigate a huge surge. I.e., perhaps it will match what happened with Delta here (a summer wave), which was nowhere near as bad as Omicron but still bad.
It's idiotic to wait until the hospitals have started filling up ONCE AGAIN before you scratch your head and say "Well... I... guess... we... should... do... something".
after any increase in cases, and any deaths from those who were hospitalized, will lag weeks after a hospitalization happens.
"Common sense" says - "the more people who get infected the more could potentially need hospitalization" - and that is regardless of a fixed number of say, 1% of those infected needing hospitalization. A 1% chunk of the sheer numbers of infections at a start of such a "megawave", can still easily overwhelm a hospital system, which is what happened with Omicron this past fall and winter.
I.e., 1% needing hospitalization out of 10,000 infected in a small city of 100,000 (where 10% were infected) = 100, which may be manageable. But if 20% of that population of 100,000 are infected due to a more contagious variant, that = 20,000 infections, and using the same (fixed) 1% figure those infected needing hospitalization, you would now double the number of hospitalizations to 200, and boom! Hospital beds filled.
So this thing about completely "ignoring infections" is just ridiculous. It's like when you have a leaky pipe and there's a slow drip and you sortof ignore it. And then a couple weeks pass and the drip increases and unless you take some action to at least temporarily patch it, the pipe may eventually burst, after which you now have to not only pay for a replacement pipe, but for all the damage the water caused.
As a chem major in college (which became my degree), I was in a number of classes with pre-meds (many were buddies) and when it came to math and those future doctors... well... 
The engineering majors who I shared classes with had a better handle on it. I will say though, out of my graduating class of about 5000, there were only 30 who got chem degrees (and 1/2 of those were transfers or older students who came back to finish a degree - and this after we started out with 100 freshman chem majors in our on-campus ACS Student Affiliate chapter)!
We gave it our best to stop COVID, right down to practically shutting down the country and sealing ourselves away for a long time, but it just seems to me that COVID is now like the flu in that it's something we'll have to learn to live with in the long term. One day, all things being ideal, someone will come up with more reliable solutions to it.
Until then, wear your mask, wash your hands extra often, get vaccinations and boosters, etcetera and so on. We've all heard the steps a million times. It'd just help if more people held themselves to them, as bothersome as they are. 
