Denis - The COVID info guy -

"COVID-19 is spreading again — how serious is it and what are the symptoms?"

Global SARS-CoV-2 cases rose by over 19,000 last month, WHO data shows.

"The real number of infections is much higher than that because countries are less focused on collecting data on the infection now than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic."

“Surveillance is happening but it’s at a much lower level than it used to be. We don’t have a complete picture of virus circulation of the variants that are out there,” says Maria Van Kerkhove

Source: https://archive.li/0D68G

Nov 4 at 11:42pmWeb
Show threadKevin Karhan Nov 4
@DenisCOVIDinfoguy the numbers will be way higher due to refusal to do testing!
Show threadDrYakNov 5
@kkarhan @DenisCOVIDinfoguy luckily, some methods of surveillance - like wastewater analysis - are not only cheap, but also do not depend on general population's willingness to test. And if aggregating a large enough zone (we do it at the treatment plant level, samples represent an aggregation of the whole catchment area) it's also privacy preserving.
Show threadKevin Karhan Nov 5

@dryak @DenisCOVIDinfoguy No question about that, but the problem is that even these measures are being cut or scrapped, thus even the stochastic prevalence analysis like that is facing huge gaps.

  • Obviously wastewater is constantly being analyzed - just like the cleaned water - to enshure the safety of the latter and quickly react in case of chemical spills or other dangerous inflow to prevent any of it being reintroduced into the drinking water grid.

It's just that if they don't test for 'Rona it's not gonna have datapoints.

Show threadEric the half-a-beeNov 5

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy

Thanks for being the #Covid guy and doing all the hard background #research for your posts. To add my lazy two-cents worth I recently got a real bad dose of Covid and it was the worst “dose of flu” that I have suffered.

It was about four days before I even thought to test myself feeling bad enough for Hospital. Stupid, because I am elderly and have heart problems.

#Antivirals made me feel a lot better.

I’m fully #vaccinated but the latest strain finally got through! Picked up at a local shopping centre.

I plan to start wearing an #N95 each time I visit a large shopping centre now, just like the old days. 👍🧐🧐🧐

Show threadDebbie BelairNov 5
@DenisCOVIDinfoguy They are hiding it. They want everyone to forget about it so they don't have to deal with it. 😞
Show threadDrYakNov 5

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy this troubles with identifying variants is exacerbated with things like BA.3.2 which has highly diverged, but has lost a bunch of auxiliary genes in a large deletion and is thetefore currently spreading at a very low rate and thus barely visible in surveillance programs.
But is litteraly one recombination event away(*) from making something much more nefarious.

(*) e.g. merging BA.3.2's highly diverged spike with a tail of some XFG* that still has all the genes in place.