COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: SARS-CoV-2 variants

  • National numbers, Feb. 21

    National numbers, Feb. 21

    In the past week (February 14 through 20), the U.S. reported about 464,000 new cases, according to the COVID Tracking Project. This amounts to:

    • An average of 66,000 new cases each day
    • 141 total new cases for every 100,000 Americans
    • 1 in 708 Americans getting diagnosed with COVID-19 in the past week
    • About two-fifths of the new cases reported in the week of January 23
    Nationwide COVID-19 metrics published in the COVID Tracking Project’s daily update on February 20. Hospitalizations are now dropping below the spring and summer peaks.

    Last week, America also saw:

    • 58,200 people now hospitalized with COVID-19 (18 for every 100,000 people)
    • 13,300 new COVID-19 deaths (4.1 for every 100,000 people)
    • An average of 1.49 million vaccinations per day (per Bloomberg)

    The number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals is now the lowest it’s been since early November. About 7,000 new patients were admitted each day this week—while this is still a huge number, it’s a notable drop from the peak (18,000 per day) we saw earlier in the winter.

    I got those new hospital admission numbers from the COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review, a new report that the CDC recently started publishing in conjunction with its COVID-19 dashboard. It’s kind-of like a longer, more numbers-heavy, less snarky version of this newsletter segment.

    The Weekly Review this past Friday also highlighted the progression of coronavirus variants in the U.S. We’ve now detected over 1,500 cases of B.1.1.7 (the variant originating in the U.K.), as well as 21 cases of B.1.351 (originated in South Africa) and 5 cases of P.1 (originated in Brazil). While sequencing efforts have increased significantly in the past few weeks, these numbers are likely still massive undercounts. The CDC encourages Americans to “stop variants by stopping the spread.” In other words, all the behaviors we’ve been using to keep ourselves and our communities safe from spreading the virus will also help reduce its opportunities to mutate.

    One more piece of good news from this week’s COVID-19 data: vaccinations may already be having an impact in nursing homes and other long-term facilities. The share of deaths occurring in these facilities dropped under 20% this week, for the first time since the COVID Tracking Project started collecting these data.

    https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/1362909841719631878

    The pace of vaccinations was slowed this week thanks to winter storms across the South and Midwest. But this news from LTC facilities is a hopeful note of how elderly Americans may be more protected in the weeks to come.

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  • Some optimistic vaccine news but variants still pose a major threat

    Some optimistic vaccine news but variants still pose a major threat

    Last week, Janssen, a pharmaceutical division owned by megacorp Johnson & Johnson, released results for its phase 3 ENSEMBLE study. The Janssen vaccine uses an adenovirus vector (a modified common cold virus that delivers the DNA necessary to make the coronavirus spike protein), can be stored at normal fridge temperatures, and only requires one dose. Here’s a table of the raw numbers from Dr. Akiko Iwasaki of Yale:

    At first glance it does look like it’s “less effective” than the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. But, when you look at the severe disease, there’s a 100% decrease in deaths. No one who got the J&J vaccine died of coronavirus, no matter where they lived— including people who definitely were diagnosed with the South African B.1.351 variant. Here’s how that compares with the Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Novavax vaccines, per Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown:

    Nobody who got any of the vaccine candidates was hospitalized or died from COVID-19. That’s huge, especially as variants continue to spread across the U.S. (Here’s the updated CDC variant tracker.)

    J&J’s numbers are especially promising when it comes to variant strains. Moderna and Pfizer released their results before the B.1.1.7 (U.K.) or B.1.351. (S.A.) variants reached their current notoriety, which makes J&J’s overall efficacy numbers look worse by comparison. But the fact that no one who got the J&J vaccine was hospitalized no matter which variant they were infected with is a cause for optimism. (B.1.351 is the variant raising alarms for possibly being able to circumvent a vaccine’s protection due to a helpful mutation called E484K. A Brazilian variant, P1, also has this mutation, though there’s not a lot of research on vaccine efficacy for this particular mutant.)

    It also means that vaccination needs to step up. While it may seem counterintuitive to step up vaccinations against variants that can supposedly circumvent them, it’s important to note that there still was a significant decrease in COVID-19 cases in vaccinated patients from South Africa. A 57% drop compared with the 95% prevalence of the B.1.351 still suggests that vaccination can prevent these cases, and thus can seriously slow the spread of the variant.

    What does all of this mean for COVID-19 rates? We can infer a few things. For starters, when vaccines are distributed to the general public around April or May, we may see hospitalization rates and death rates drop more than positive test rates. Positive test rates should obviously drop too, but they’ll probably stay at least a little higher than hospitalizations and death rates for a while.

    Second, it means that we really need to ramp up sequencing efforts in the U.S.. We need more data to tell us just how well these vaccines can protect against the spreading variants, but we can’t collect that data if we don’t know which strain of SARS-CoV-2 someone gets. We here at the CDD have covered sequencing efforts – or lack thereof – before, but the rollout has still been painfully slow. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stressed that “we should be treating every case as if it’s a variant during this pandemic right now,” during the January 29 White House coronavirus press briefing. But the 6,000 sequences per week she’s pushing for as of the February 1 briefing should have been the benchmark months ago. We’re still largely flying blind until we can get our act together.

    Some states in particular may be flying blinder than others. As Caroline Chen wrote in ProPublica yesterday, governors of New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, and Idaho are planning to relax more restrictions, including those on indoor dining. Such a plan is probably the perfect way to ensure these variants spread, so much that even Chen was surprised at how pessimistic the outlook was when she asked 10 scientists for the piece.

    The B.1.1.7 variant is expected to become the dominant strain in the U.S. by March, according to the CDC. And on top of that, the B.1.1.7 variant seems to have picked up that helpful E484K mutation in some cases as well. Per Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University, if these governors don’t realize how much they’re about to screw everything up, “the worst could be yet to come.” God help us.

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