Are all of these due to covid? No, almost certainly not. Are a lot of them? Yes. How many others are due to inability or unwillingness to access healthcare? We will honestly never know, but my guess is a lot of the non-directly covid deaths are still covid adjacent, or by-catch as I have termed it before. This essentially says that we have way too many people dead who should not be.
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Ugh. A few weeks ago Phillyâs cases were in the 80âs and the positivity rate was 1.8.
This is going to blow up big time.
â Tracking COVID-19
At a glance (vs. a week ago)
Pennsylvania: cases â, positivity rate â
Philadelphia: cases â, positivity rate â
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Pennsylvaniaâs rolling average is 1,461 new cases/day, 9% higher than a week ago. There have been 185k total positives out of 2.34M tests taken. Statewide positivity rate is averaging 4.4%, up eight-tenths of a point from a week ago. [health.pa.gov]
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Philadelphia is averaging 198 new cases/day (2% higher than a week ago) out of 4,000 daily tests. The average positivity rate is 4.8%, same as a week ago. Over the past 30 days, positive cases were 41% unknown race/ethnicity, along with 18% African American, 22% white, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian.â
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The new snow day:
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One of the reasons is masks. Lower viral loads for initial infection.
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Some is shift in demographics of the infected, but even in the elderly mortality rate has dropped dramatically. Use of dexamethasone, improved knowledge of the mechanisms of illness, anticoagulation all play a part in this. Masks certainly play a role as well, and easily the most cost-effective intervention on the list, but sadly also the most controversial (for stupid reasons, butâŠ)
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Very true and the study is just one health system. But controlling for age and comorbidies still showed a drop in all categories averaging 18%, according to the article. Even the eldest.
Iâll take my hope where I can find it 
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I teared up thru most of this. We HAVE to change this administration, in every aspect. SENATE Included.
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All that controversy is the governments fault. In countries where government mandated mask wearing at the start of pandemic (like Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia) there wasnât much controversy. It also wasnât a partisan issue - Polish government is right wing, and obviously left and neoliberals also supported the idea. While recently we had some covidiot protests (mostly from typical antivaxxers), the attendance was pathetic 
Sadly recently governments ideas got divorced from reality, with disastrous results:
First they reopened everything during summer vacations, but the rise in cases was surprisingly small due to mandatory masks, so it was a success. They as vacations ended they reopened schools and refused to acknowledge that children spread disease (they say that people are just getting infected on the streets, despite lack of evidence). Now it seems that either a second lockdown or a total humanitarian disaster is likely.
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That was both inspiring and agonizing. 
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Mr. Eduardo Pazuello, brazilian minister of health, has tested positive for Covid-19.
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The NPR story didnât discuss it, but I wonder if the virus is also starting to evolve to become less deadly? Itâs happened with many other viruses in the past- the evolutionary pressure for any virus is to multiply, not necessarily to kill.
Obviously we need to treat this thing as if itâs as deadly as ever, but survival-friendly viral evolution is something we can hope for, anyway!
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A Brazilian volunteer who participated in the vaccine tests developed by the University of Oxford died yesterday; the lab does not say whether he got the vaccine or a placebo.
Mr. JoĂŁo Pedro Feitosa was 28 years old, a recently graduated doctor and a resident of Rio de Janeiro.
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Thereâs no selective pressure for it to do so currently: by the time it kills sometime, theyâre already little use to it. I think it would take many waves for there to be any emergent value to keeping the host alive after the initial contagious period.
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I think itâs pretty clear that a virus that can spread from an asymptomatic individual has an advantage over one that can only be spread by someone who is visibly ill and coughing, especially in an environment where people are very wary about interacting with anyone who doesnât look well. And the longer that someone is asymptomatic, the longer they can spread the virus. While the virus may not âcareâ what happens to its host once the host is done spreading, itâs not a stretch to think that someone who gets very ill very quickly is more likely to die than someone who takes longer to develop any symptoms.
But itâs all speculation for now, as far as I know. Unless someone has been tracking the molecular evolution of the virus in real time like that article suggests.
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This seems to be trendingâŠ
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A senator of the Brazilian Republic, who was against social distancing and lockdowns, just died of Covid. Rest in peace. This virus is such a terrible thing.
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Hang in there, yâall over in the European Union.
Ye gods, really sorry to hear. Iâve been following via The Irish Times and Independent.ie. (Btw if you have a solid recommendation re an Irish newspaper you like, please let me know.)
Youâre not kidding about the seesawâwhat I sense having read those papers is akin to whiplash.
Truth.
Same goes for us all.
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in the us, we canât even manage tracking of whoâs actually dying of coronavirus all that well. ( the excess deaths this year indicate tracking has probably missed more than 75k people ). so the step from there to genetically tracing whether a particular strain is more or less deadly would be difficult.
that said, to me, the idea that it mitigates itâs deadliness over time âfor reasonsâ seems unlikely. did smallpox or polio ever become less deadly? and even if a mutated strain was somehow less deadly, would our immune system necessarily even view the covid-19 strain and some new covid-20 strain as the same? why wouldnât we be just as likely to get sick with both?
for an even more depressing thought, covid-19 mutated from a less deadly disease into a more deadly disease⊠so either direction for some new independently infectious variant seems just as likely down the line.
i think ( my random opinion ) that the most we can hope for is that the vaccines work, and that the virus is stable enough that we donât need a new vaccine variant every year like we do for the flu.
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