Daily SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths for 177 countries and territories and 181 subnational locations were extracted from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s modelling database. Cumulative infection rate and infection-fatality ratio (IFR) were estimated …
Most cross-country variation in cumulative infection rates could not be explained. The factors that explained the most variation in COVID-19 IFR over the same period were the age profile of the country (46·7% [18·4–67·6] of variation), GDP per capita (3·1% [0·3–8·6] of variation), and national mean BMI (1·1% [0·2–2·6] of variation). 44·4% (29·2–61·7) of cross-national variation in IFR could not be explained.
… note that Herby, Jonung, and Hanke themselves used the term “working paper” to describe what they had put together. Simply calling it a “Johns Hopkins study” glosses over this important distinction. A working paper is not the same as a peer-reviewed study published in a reputable scientific journal … anyone who has access to the Internet, a laptop/smartphone, and opposable thumbs, can post a “working paper” on a website.
Out of an initial batch of more than 18,590 studies, Hanke and his co-authors based their conclusions on 34 papers. They minimized or excluded papers written by epidemiologists, arguing that ones written by economists or political scientists should receive more weight because of their expertise in public policy.
“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home … decreases disease transmission. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed,” reads a critique by the University of Oxford’s Seth Flaxman, the lead author on a 2020 study which estimated that lockdowns had likely saved up to three million lives across Europe.
I don’t know about this “John Hopkins Study”, but the original purpose of all of the restrictions, including lockdowns, was to “flatten the curve” of cases vs. time, to prevent hospital overload. Prior to the vaccines, staying in your (as in "one’s) house and avoiding any contact with others was obviously a sure way to prevent transmission. An extreme measure, but effective.
Unfortunately, pre-vaccine, people who stayed in their homes, either voluntarily or by mandate, remained susceptible to infection once they did come out of the house. Protection by sheltering in place by itself doesn’t confer permanent protection to a virus, individually or collectively. Unless everyone stays at home indefinitely, contact-free, which is ludicrous.
On the other hand, in the current vaccine phase of the pandemic if you’re fully vaccinated and boosted you (as in “one”) can come out of the house. You’ll maybe get infected, but except in cases of co-morbidities you probably won’t burden the hospitals.
The concept of lockdowns in places where vaccines are abundant and readily accessible is outdated, in other words. You and anyone you unwittingly transmit the virus to, if also fully vaccinated and boosted, can be pretty sure you won’t be contributing to the hospital problem. The curve would definitely have remained flat if everyone, or almost everyone, had done that in the US.
But of course, not even close to everyone has done that in the US. The problem in the US is an attitude issue, the asinine politicization of effective and safe vaccines, as one of the articles you posted pointed out.
Staying home often didn’t help those who lived with people who had to leave home to work, especially when work was a viral hotspot such as a meat-packing plant and/or there were a lot of people sharing a small home. Hence the demographically uneven distribution of infection in Los Angeles.
The claim that lockdowns didn’t reduce deaths was on the face of it preposterous, given how effective they were in e.g. China and Australia.
Fatigue and brain fog lasting 3 - 6 months (and sometimes longer) are two of the most common post-infection covid symptoms. One factor complicating things was pointed out in a PBS article last year:
While some people who have had COVID-19 report brain fog and fatigue as lingering symptoms of their infection — what’s known as long COVID — mental health care providers around the U.S. are hearing similar complaints from people who weren’t infected by the virus.
This kind of mental fog is real and can have a few different causes. But at the root of it are the stress and trauma of the past [time period], say mental health experts. It’s a normal reaction to a very abnormal [time period].
This doesn’t dilute the issue of work absences, or the “long covid” malaise itself that’s discussed in the WKZO report, but it does make it hard to know if the symptoms were in fact directly related to covid, especially in cases of asymptomatic infections that may never have been identified.
In the US, there have been ten times as many cumulative deaths over the past two years from covid as in two typical pre-pandemic years from the flu. In China, on the other hand, the number of deaths from covid in the same two years has been, relatively, miniscule. Of course lockdowns, quarantine camps, and prohibited intermingling between actually and even potentially infected individuals, groups, cities and regions greatly reduces transmission of a readily-communicable disease like covid.
This has effectively staved off deaths from covid in China – so far. It bought them time, and by now, almost 90% of mainland Chinese are vaccinated (vs. approximately 65% fully vaccinated in the US), so if the Chinese vaccines work against omicron and are durable, the Chinese are in pretty good shape.
Over the long term, though, they may have to regularly repeat their strategy of almost unbearable, draconian-sounding lockdowns and isolation, because new covid variants aren’t going to go away. Or, if their vaccines somehow induced widespread robust T-cell protection among the population (who knows?), maybe not. Time will tell, but I wouldn’t want to have that possible scenario to look forward to.
Instead we are looking forward to the scenario of having more than 1 million covid deaths (and very likely highly underestimated) in the US soon with many more to come (and likely many more long covid cases which will have a significant impact on the health system for years to come) - not sure if this is much more desirable
Prior to the vaccines, it was largely the elderly who were dying from covid in the US (and elsewhere). Many of the deaths during that period, especially in nursing homes, could have been prevented, if not all, without resorting to “home imprisonment” and quarantine camps as in China. The US didn’t act fast enough with reasonable preventative measures in the first year.
People over 65 were eligible for vaccines in January 2021 (which is when I got my first shot), and by March (I believe) they were pretty easy to get for most adults. Way too many people in the US just decided not to get them or delayed getting them for a long time. And now, the Formerly-Supreme Court says that vaccines can’t even be mandated by the federal government.
A great many of the deaths after April of last year could have been prevented in the US simply by vaccination, in other words. There’s no telling how many, exactly, but vaccine resistance was to blame for a huge number of deaths, and still is.
Vaccinations and curative medicines are the scenario that will hopefully circumvent any need for draconian lockdown measures. That’s the scenario that I envision. And for the people who choose not to get vaccinated, I have no sympathy. I just hope that the hospitals give me that bed for my heart attack rather than to some unvaccinated idiot who got seriously ill.
This seems idiotic and irresponsible to me. The only way to make sure that the unvaccinated wear masks is for everyone to wear them. And despite Omicron’s rapid decline, community spread is still almost as high as it has ever been. And the next variant to come along could be worse.
For me, though, it’s not just about the unvaccinated wearing masks. I will be keeping my mask on indoors for at least the next few wks and still trying to keep a “decent” distance away from others outdoors…
More interesting papers around long Covid and its implications, The second is interesting as it shows quite significant impact on heart diseases even if you didn’t have significant/hospitalized covid diseases (and raises also questions around asymptomatic cases)
And one good comment on Twitter - “ The risk of major adverse cardiovascular event is 2.3% among all COVID survivors. With over 41 million covid survivors in the US, we can expect millions of cardiovascular events and almost 1 million will be major.”
And it makes the removal of mask mandates even more questionable - come for the covid infection, stay for the heart attack
That, and the neurological consequences, concern me a great deal…
Excerpt: Last week, L.A. County’s health officials said they intend to keep their indoor mask mandate in place beyond the state deadline until hospitalizations have dropped below 2,500 for seven consecutive days, and case counts drop to 50 new cases per 100,000.
I somehow missed that the Super Bowl was being held in LA. Will be interesting to see case positivity rates after that…
How different is that from the same demographic who did not have Covid? Almost half of American adults have cardiovascular disease. It’s the #1 cause of death, killing around 700,000 a year.
These are additional people with increased chances of heart attack. As you can see from the paper you can associate certain risk factors/percentage to everybody but having covid quite significantly increases your risk factor for CV diseases - if you had a low/no risk before you now might have a higher chance - if you had a higher chance before, now you have an even higher probability
You might also have muscle inflammation (myositis), problems with your central nervous system, and heart problems such as heart attacks, inflammation of the organ (myocarditis), and inflammation of the sac around it (pericarditis).
and
Also, and more importantly, there is newly published information about what signals a propensity for developing long-haul covid:
Some of the key differences are that with flu your increased risk for heart disease is heightened within in a relative short time frame around your infection and you tend to have a higher risk if you are predisposed to CVD etc. but not. so much if you don’t have risk factors. Current data for Covid looks quite different as your increased risk might last for a very long time and you might get CVD (or other diseases) risk even if you weren’t at risk before which means we might get many, many more people with severe diseases in the future
I agree with you about the usual duration of “long-haul flu” vs. long-haul covid, except in the case of geriatric patients. But flu was just a familiar example. There are others, like chickenpox.
Anyway, of the four risk factors cited in The Scientist article I posted, only one has to do with an active pre-existing medical condition: type 2 diabetes.
Here are the four risk factors that pre-dispose long-haul covid, as concluded by the study authors.
The level of coronavirus RNA in the patient’s blood.
The presence of certain autoantibodies.
The reactivation of the EBV.
Having type 2 diabetes
Almost everybody has had and recovered from Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), but afterward, it continues to linger in a latent state. It can evidently be re-activated by the covid virus, sometimes.
Here’s another good writeup about this, referring to the (very recent) article in Cell:
It’s good that progress is being made toward understanding long covid and its warning signs.
