Edmund Schweppe

( Wall-o-text )

Newly confirmed deaths doubled compared to last week - but at ten, it's still a tiny number for a full week, even compared to the July 2021 calm before the delta and omicron storms. Confirmed cases and tests are also down (no surprise there), as are hospitalizations. Three of the four seven-day averages are down compared to last week; the seven-day deaths average ticked up slightly, from the all-time lowest observed value recorded last week. Massachusetts Water Resources Authority wastewater levels on the north side ticked up slightly and ticked down a bit more on the south side; both are still above one hundred, though, and thus far above the all-time lows.

Not horrible numbers overall, but not really supporting a local "COVID is over!" celebration, either.

( Wall-o-text )

Headline numbers are mixed; one fewer confirmed death, 22 more confirmed cases, and 13 fewer COVID patients in hospital, along with a slight decrease in percent-positive ratio. Tests, of course, dropped yet again; this week's average of 2,474 tests per day is the lowest since March 20, 2020 (2,466.86). The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority wastewater levels are, alas, up from last week; on the other hand, they've been hovering around a seven-day average of two hundred copies per milliliter or so since mid-April, so it's hard to read very much into one week's changes.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration is considering rolling out an omicron-variant-only COVID vaccine this fall:, according to the Associated Press:
( Read more... )

( Wall-o-text )

Newly reported deaths (both confirmed and probable) are unchanged from last week. Newly reported confirmed cases are down while newly reported probable cases are up, with a net effect of a slight increase in newly reported cases. Newly reported tests continue to drop, driving the percent-positive ratio up again; today's reported 4.15% is the highest since March 16. Hospitalization counts are up again, as are patients in ICUs. Wastewater levels on both sides of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority sewershed are down a bit compared to last week, but are mixed compared to two weeks ago and are way, way higher than the levels two years ago during the summer 2021 valley.

All in all, not horrible numbers statewide, but not (IMNSHO) great numbers either.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 Coordinator, is leaving the post next week:
( Read more... )
No word on who - if anyone - will replace him.

( Wall-o-text )

Newly confirmed deaths are down, and current hospitalizations are down slightly. However, newly confirmed cases are up even as tests continue to plummet to levels not seen since March 20, 2020, thus driving another increase in percent-positivity. MRWA wastewater levels are also up - a big jump on the northside, a small one on the southside - with both being over two hundred copies/milliliter again.

I would really like to have one of these updates be purely good news. I'm not getting my desire this week.

( Wall-o-text )

Rather less than great news in today's Massachusetts numbers, as both confirmed and probable deaths more than doubled compared to last week. Confirmed and probable cases actually rose again even as tests continued to decay away; the seven-day percent-positive rate is up to 3.46%. The only good news is the (slight) decline in patients currently hospitalized for COVID. Reported wastewater levels at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority are a mixed bag, with northside levels down thirteen percent from last week but southside levels jumping to over double last week's numbers. These numbers don't look too bad in absolute terms, but the trends aren't good.

Surprise! My iPhone just notified me that it had turned off Exposure Notifications. Apparently, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts just shut down their notification system:

MassNotify, the official COVID-19 exposure notification system for Massachusetts, was discontinued with the end of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, 2023.

Of course, the death, case and hospitalization counts all went up this week. But the emergency is officially over, and that's all that counts. Right?

Feh.

Today's the day that the federal and state COVID-19 public health emergencies end. That doesn't mean the pandemic is over, as three different items (one article and two opinion pieces) in today's Boston Globe show.
First off, if you look at excess deaths, the threat is still not over:
( Read more... )

Meanwhile, the Globe's Editorial Board likes the state lifting its health care mask mandate, assuming that hospitals know best:
( Read more... )
The Globe editorial doesn't address the danger of persons who are asymptomatic but infections.

Nor does that editorial address the danger of long COVID. Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a Globe columnist who herself has long COVID, reminds readers that the nation shouldn't leave the long haulers behind:
( Read more... )

To sum up: declaring the emergencies to be over doesn't mean people aren't dying, or that survivors aren't running into serious problems obtaining long-term care. It just means most folks (including the Globe editorial board, apparently) can now stop pretending to give a damn. Until they are individually affected, I guess.

Feh.

A fair bit of news today on the COVID front, with local, national and global stories.
The local story, on the front page of today's Boston Globe: Most major health care systems in Massachusetts will lift their mask requirements next week:
( Mask on, mask off )
The idea that declining rates of reported cases is a good reason to drop mask requirements strikes me as silly, since the drop in reported cases is directly tied to the drop in reported tests. Color me cynical, but I rather suspect the real reason for dropping mask requirements is an epidemic of the Dont-Wannas, as in "I don't wanna wear a mask anymore!".

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will lose their test and case count data once the federal public health emergency declaration expires next Thursday. so their plan is to track weekly hospitals and deaths instead:
( No more case tracking )
Frankly, dropping the "COVID Community Level" isn't much of a loss. On the other hand, hospitalizations and deaths are very much trailing indicators of new surges; those numbers only go up once a whole lot of people are infected.

And, in global news, the World Health Organization is officially declaring that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency:
( No longer an emergency, honest! )
Well, okay, then.

One thing I didn't see in any of the above stories: any mention at all about dealing with long COVID and its potentially crippling effects. The WHO did recommend that nations "continue to support research ... to understand the full spectrum, incidence and impact of post COVID-19 condition", which I suppose is better than nothing. But, for those with long COVID and those who develop it in the future, it's not much better than nothing.

Okay, this is good news. In a happy milestone, a Boston hospital reports zero inpatients with COVID-19:
( Read more... )
I'm not super excited; looking at the state's latest raw data (8.9Mb .xlsx file), Tufts only had two COVID patients on April 25, while twenty-four other (mostly small) hospitals statewide reported zero. The problem is the places like Baystate Medical Center out in Springfield, which reported forty-one patients ...

I have been able to find a source for the levels of COVID-19 virus in (some of) Massachusetts' wastewater (the raw data for the COVID-19 Wastewater Report), so I've added that to the new wall-o-text.

Any good news?

( Wall-o-text, now including MWRA wastewater levels )

The good news is that confirmed deaths, confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and percent-positive are all continuing to drop statewide. The not-so-good news is that tests also continue to drop; today's reported seven-day average of 5,086.4 is the lowest since 5,043.1 were reported on April 3, 2020.

The MWRA wastewater numbers are down from last week on both the north and south sides; however, the south side numbers are actually higher than two weeks ago. I don't have a good feel yet for how changes in wastewater levels affect cases, hospitalizations or deaths, so I'm hesitant to leap to conclusions. But I do note that the wastewater levels are far, far higher today than they were during the summer 2021 low point of the pandemic. The seven-day case average bottommed out at 64.1 cases/day on June 25, 2021 and today's average of 136.9 is just over double that; on the other hand, the MWRA northside average for 6/25/2021 was 20.4 copies/mL and the currently most recent average is 225.4, well over ten times higher. There is a lot more COVID floating around than is showing up in the official case figures.

I'm also hesitant to put too much stock in the current data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Case counts are down nationwide, but it looks to me as though testing is also way down. Unfortunately, I haven't found any CDC data feed that specifically shows tests per county or state, so I can't confirm that hunch. And I have a bad feeling that, once the national public health emergency ends on May 11, the CDC's data tracking capabilities are going to be significantly changed - and not for the better.

Hopefully, Massachusetts will keep making its data available, at least.

I'm rebuilding my wall-o-text builder, in large part because the testing numbers keep dropping and I wanted to include seven-day averages, trends, etc. for tests as well as cases, deaths, percent-positive and hospitalizations.

(I also am working on trying to get wastewater numbers, but that code isn't quite ready for prime time yet.)

( Wall-o-text, new version )

Confirmed deaths and cases are down again, along with the current hospitalization counts and the percent-positive rate. Unfortunately, the test counts continue to drop as well; the seven-day average number of tests per day (5,812.9) is at the lowest level since April 6, 2020 (5,782.1), and it's only getting worse every week.

Last year at this time, with roughly the same deaths and hospitalization numbers, we were running around thirty eight thousand tests per day; at that test rate and today's percent-positive ratio, we'd be reporting over a thousand cases per day today. I really don't trust those case numbers anymore.

One other not particularly good milestone: this week, the state surpassed two thousand probable deaths from COVID.

There's a new note on today's state dashboard:

Please note: Today's dashboard (April 6, 2023) includes an update to the way COVID-19 deaths are defined for public health surveillance. The new definition is consistent with national recommendations and applies to deaths occurring as of April 1, 2023.

Pity they didn't say what the change was ...

( Wall-o-text, covering 7 days of data )

Statewide, the good news is a substantial drop in newly reported deaths (34 this week, 59 last week); of course, that might be due to whatever change they made in death reporting (as noted above). There was also a (smaller) drop in hospitalizations (310 this week, 315 last). There is also a good drop in newly reported confirmed cases, but the number of tests being performed continues to drop, and that's terrible. The CDC national case numbers continue to drop, but the death numbers actually are up from last week (1,773 deaths this week compared to 1,537 last week).

In today's report, Massachusetts averaged 6,411.29 tests per day over the latest seven days of reported data. That is the lowest that number has been since April 8, 2020, at the very beginnings of the pandemic, when the state averaged 6,360.86 tests per day over the previous seven days. (Back then, the supply of tests was still a huge issue, and the percent-positive rate was an atrocious 26.66%. Today's reported percent-positive rate is a mere 3.70% by comparison, which I will grant is far better.)

Last year at this time, the state was averaging around forty seven thousand tests per day, more than seven times higher than today's number. With a lower percent-positive rate (2.66% versus 3.70%), last year's seven-day confirmed case average was 922. Ain't no way there are really only a couple of hundred new cases per day statewide. Stay masked up, folks!

( Wall-o-text, covering 7 days of data )

Statewide, newly reported confirmed deaths and cases are both down from last week, as is the current hospitalization count and all four of the seven-day averages. The national numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also are trending in good directions. The CDC is reporting Community Levels of Low in all counties, and Community Transmission Levels of Moderate in twelve of the fourteen counties in Massachusetts.

Over, splendid news - with a a couple of exceptions. The first problem is that statewide test counts continue to drop as well. The state continues to set new records for the fewest new molecular tests; the seven-day average of tests by test date (6,779.57) hasn't been that low since April 9, 2020, back at the beginning of the pandemic. The state wasn't actually reporting that number back then, but based on the historical data in today's raw data download, the seven-day average of tests was 6,613.29. Back then, the problem was getting any tests at all; today, the issue is that so few people are getting official, lab-based tests.

The second thing I'm concerned about is the level of COVID in the wastewater. That level had been dropping fairly consistently for a few weeks, even though it was still substantially higher that either the 2021 or 2022 lows. However, the current MWRA data shows a bit of an upward trend, with the seven-day averages for both the north and south sides of the MWRA system back above 400 copies/mL for the first time in a few weeks. There's a lot of noise in that data, so I'm hesitant to leap to any conclusions. But any upward trend is not good.

(Note to self: I really need to get some automatic way of reading that wastewater data.)

In other discouraging but not terribly surprising news, the White House is going to disband their COVID-19 response team in May, once the public health emergencies expire:
( Read more... )
I wish I could say I was surprised. On the other hand, if the Biden Administration is giving up on extraordinary measures to protect folks from COVID, it sort of makes sense that they'd also give up on having the COVID-specific response office. (The Globe story does note that a new White House "pandemic response office" will be set up later this year.)

For now, though, the message seems clear: if you're still concerned about getting COVID, you're on your own.

May 11 won't be just the end of the Federal COVID public health emergency, it will be the end of the Massachusetts one as well:
( Read more... )
No word yet on what data, if any, the state will publicly release provide going forward.

Also conspicuously absent: any sort of plan to improve indoor air quality to reduce the spreading of COVID. Or any other airborne infectious agent, for that matter.

Feh.

( Wall-o-text, covering 7 days of data )

Statewide, newly reported deaths and cases are both down substantially compared to last week, as are the hospitalization counts and the four seven-day averages; this is all very good looking news. The one fly in the ointment, as far as I'm concerned, is that the newly reported test counts are also dropping. The state only reported 57,662 new molecular tests over the past week, the lowest seven-day figure in the entire dataset (starting June 1, 2020). The state has reported at least a hundred thousand tests per week every week from July 16, 2020 through November 10, 2022; the state has reported under seventy thousand tests per week every week since January 19, 2023. It seems pretty damn obvious to me that the state's official counts seriously underestimate the amount of COVID out there. Presumably, the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also suffer from the same undercounting of cases.

Meanwhile, the latest wastewater data from the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority is showing seven-day average counts of 466 and 416 copies/mL from the south and north sides as of March 7. Last March 7, those averages were 117 and 102 copies/mL, respectively. Four times as much COVID in the wastewater compared to a year ago, yet half the case rate? Gotta admit, that doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence in the current case numbers.

And the Boston Globe ran a couple of stories about long COVID on their website recently. Yesterday, they reported on a study from the United Kingdom showing that nearly sixty percent of long COVID patients had damage to at least one organ. Today, they've got a story from Bloomberg about a possible link between long COVID and the recent surge in disability among American women.

Yay. </sarcasm>