Coronavirus Thread: Worldwide Pandemic

Hood Critic

Hood Critic

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GnauzBookOfRhymes said:
Brehs/brehettes....please read this joke of an article. It's just insane at this point.

Omicron clues point to a tidal wave of cases headed for the U.S.
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What exactly was Axios trying to convey in this article? :gucci:

This is all I took from it despite the ominous tone:

The bottom line: "Frankly we don't have enough reliable, robust data at this point to give a clear direction as to what this will look like in the weeks to months ahead," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
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mastermind

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Jen Psaki Accidentally Tells the Truth About How Expensive Covid Rapid Tests Are in U.S.

“That’s kind of complicated, though,” Liasson said. “Why not just make ’em free and give ’em out, make them available everywhere?”

“Should we just send one to every American?” Psaki shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Maybe,” Liasson replied.

“Then what happens if you, if every American has one test? How much does that cost?” Psaki asked, suggesting that sending Americans tests to regularly screen themselves for the virus would be prohibitively expensive.

Experts who have pushed for the Biden administration to flood the country with free rapid tests, as a way of finding asymptomatic cases to slow the spread of the virus, were particularly outraged that the president’s spokesperson suggested that the initiative would be too costly.

“By dismissing the idea of sending every American a rapid test due to cost, she seems to imply that the insurance reimbursement plan won’t come close to doing that,” Jennifer Nuzzo, lead epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, commented on Twitter. Nuzzo had complained to The Hill earlier this week that the administration was placing “barriers” in front of people by not simply buying tests for all Americans. “The most preferable option would be to make these goddamn things free or close to free and make them widely available so people can just pick them up,” she said.

“Rapid tests are hard to get, expensive & could be a key intervention in fighting #COVID19,” Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale Medical School, wrote in a tweet addressed to Psaki and Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator. “Other countries have figured out better ways to get these tools into the hands of their citizens. Do better.”

“Give out rapid tests to every household? Yessss! Of course, we should!” Oni Blackstock, a doctor who once led New York City’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, chimed in on Twitter. “That this appears to be some quixotic idea to the administration is incredibly concerning and a reminder of why we have not been able to get control this pandemic here in the US.”

Michael Mina, a physician who teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, estimated more than a year ago that the spread of Covid-19 could be dramatically curtailed if just half of the U.S. population tested themselves every four days with at-home rapid kits that could cost the U.S. government as little as $5 billion.

Mina, who argues that the U.S. government should mail rapid tests to every American household, suggested that Psaki’s comments reveal that the administration is unwilling to take emergency measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic that might challenge the nation’s fundamentally for-profit health care system. “Maybe at some point our FDA, CDC and administration will understand finally this is a PUBLIC HEALTH problem, and not a Medical problem to make $$ off of,” Mina tweeted. “Maybe.”

What Psaki’s comments accidentally drew attention to is that even during a pandemic, Americans are still paying more for health care than their counterparts in countries with socialized medicine or single-payer systems.

Experts like Mina and Nuzzo have urged the U.S. government to use its leverage to press test-makers to sell the kits for between $1 and $5 each. But because the Biden administration has tried to work within the constraints of America’s profit-driven system, commercially available rapid tests are considerably more expensive for consumers and often hard to find in stores. Abbott Laboratories’ BinaxNOW kit, for instance, can be purchased by the government for $5 each but costs consumers $11.99 a test at CVS or Walgreens.
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storyteller

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Hood Critic said:
What exactly was Axios trying to convey in this article? :gucci:

This is all I took from it despite the ominous tone:
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That's genuinely the right takeaway so far. There are early returns but nothing anyone would make a big declaration on (for what it's worth, what little I've seen says it's more infectious but with less likelihood for hospitalization). Everyone gets into a rush to have conclusions and then three weeks from now you'll have people citing these initial articles as proof that science got it wrong when experts are all saying "wait for more data" under it all. Here's another article with that explicitly stated,

Top Covid experts on the questions they want answered about Omicron

Leading Covid-19 experts on the questions they want answered about Omicron

For some Covid experts, what’s most unsettling about the Omicron variant is all the uncertainty surrounding it. That’s what keeps John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, up at night.

“I’ve lost more sleep worrying about answering questions about Omicron than over Omicron itself,” he said during a panel at STAT’s “A Look Ahead at Biotech 2022”event last week.

Moore, like many other experts, is waiting for more data before judging how the new variant is going to pan out. More time will tell us whether Omicron will fizzle out and be forgettable like Beta, or if it will be much more consequential and replace Delta, in much the same way Delta replaced Alpha.

“If we start to see a lot of vaccinated people in the hospitals with Omicron, that’s going to be something that changes the face of the pandemic in the USA,” he said. “That’s not happened yet.”

But, he added, it’s not clear yet whether that’s because too little time has passed for the variant’s true impact to be revealed, or if it is because that worst-case scenario is not going to happen.

Another Omicron unknown is the share of Covid cases in the U.S. that involve the new variant. The small clusters seen so far do not tell experts enough, he said. Unsatisfied with the dearth of information, epidemiologists and infectious disease physicians are growing impatient — as is the public, which is clamoring for insights.

“We’re so thirsty for data now and therefore we’re reaching for anything,” Wafaa El-Sadr, founder and director of the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Program at Columbia University, said at the panel. She pointed to a recent 12-person study on Omicron that offered a very early look at the variant.

“You can see a lot of strange things in 12 people, and you’ve got to be very careful with what you generalize, El-Sadr said. She also cautioned against putting too much currency in anecdotes coming from the ground in South Africa and the U.K. “We’re all grasping at these little hints here and there, and that, I think, is quite unsettling.”


El-Sadr is confident that scientists will find more robust data in the coming weeks. Those findings, she said, will provide insight into how infectious the variant is, how deadly it is and most importantly whether it would be able to “outsmart” current vaccinations and treatments.

Right now, Moore said, the world is still in a phase of not having “enough information to know what’s going to happen.”

“There’s still a lot that we don’t have answers to yet,” said Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at NYU and Bellevue Hospital. “It does appear to be very infectious, likely even more infectious than Delta.”

Delta, she said, was so deadly because it was so infectious. “If so many people get infected, even if it’s a less virulent variant — which we still don’t have an answer on with Omicron— it can still be very deadly,” said Gounder.

“That’s actually what I’m most concerned about in the moment about Omicron,” she said.
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Sidenote: Statnews and especially StatPlus are pretty good for reporting on medical science news.
 
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