Shutdown Diary
One of my issues with Washpo's stat summary is it focuses on the full vs partially vaccinated. But it has a separate vaccination tracker: "At least 97.6 million people have received one or both doses of the vaccine in the U.S. This includes more than 51.3 million people who have been fully vaccinated." That puts me among the 46.3 million who have been partially vaccinated. So about 77.7% of 328M=255M adults, 18-over. which suggests at least 38.2% of adults are at least partially vaccinated.
I'm due to get my second shot Friday. My RN sister and I clashed over a Texas memory care home policy involving an elderly female relative. The relative has been fully vaccinated for about 2 months, but staff will not let her vaccinated daughter-in-law hug her. My sister pointed out the daughter-in-law only recently had her second shot and it takes up to 2 weeks for the body to develop antibodies. What my sister fails to understand is the daughter in law got her first dose nearly a month earlier. That first shot confers the biggest boost, maybe up to 80% effective. So the second dose, which may also require up to 2 weeks, adds a smaller margin of effectiveness. I think some people are worried about asymptomatic vaccinated. My sister countered that her niece had at least 7 in her hospital. And my response was: out of how many vaccinated? I've seen stats in the range of maybe 1%. I'm not saying one shouldn't feel invulnerable (there are variants that are contingent and we don't know how much protection acquired immunity provides) but it's highly unlikely for the vaccinated to be carriers.. For many elderly people, it's cruel to deprive them as Springsteen reminds us of "human touch". They haven't done anything wrong but are being punished for their own "good".
In my nuclear family, all but one sister (who lives in rural/isolated East Texas) are at least partially vaccines, meaning 7 of 8, and half are fully vaccinated.
A short list of recent talking points:
- AstraZeneca's faulty data submission. Basically the company had not included certain less favorable results, lowering reported effectiveness from 79% to 76% against developing COVID-19 symptoms. I think the issue had more to do with human error in reporting than misleading reporting.
- "vaccination passports" have been a hot topic, particularly in libertarian and certain conservative circles. Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) has threatened measures against private businesses deploying them. Rogue Congresswoman Greene has called them an apocalyptical "Mark of the Beast". I think there are some intrinsic problems in the sense we don't know how long immunity lasts, the effectiveness against variants, etc. I do have some concerns over government-issued ones, but as a libertarian, I support freedom of association, including among vaccinated people.
- more states are making all adults eligible for vaccination, and we are seeing some preliminary data (e.g., Pfizer) on the use of vaccines for older minors (mid-teens).
The latest stats from Washpo (the increases in positive tests and cases are worrisome):
In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases rose 12.1%
New daily reported deaths fell 0.4%
Covid-related hospitalizations rose 0.2%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 9.7%.
The number of tests reported rose 36.2% from the previous week.
Readership
I'm a statistics junkie; I remember calculating my seventh-grade gym batting average, The blog is within 300 of a quarter-million pageviews over the life of the blog, a milestone. For some odd reason, I've had the lowest pageviews over the past day than in months but I came within single digits of hitting 2000 pageviews last month, an informal target. I really thought I would be picking up more Twitter followers by now; it's held now steady in the upper single digits for some time now. My monthly stats continue to drift down, in part because I've not been inspired by recent trends.
