By RICHARD SKOLNIK
Los Alamos
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh in a series of COVID-19 Updates by Richard Skolnik that appear bi-weekly in the Los Alamos Daily Post. These are meant to keep the community informed on the status of the pandemic, critical new findings on the pandemic, and what this information suggests for our community’s response to COVID-19. These updates complement the data that Eli Ben-Naim prepares for the Post. Unless otherwise noted, data is from the New York Times and the New Mexico Department of Health.
Pandemic Data and Trends – For the Week Ending Dec. 6, 2021
In the US, the daily average of new cases increased by 28% over the last two weeks. Hospitalizations increased by 18% and deaths increased by 13%. The daily average of new cases in the US over the last week was about 120,000, equal to 36 cases per 100,000 population. Thirty-nine states had increasing rates of new cases.
Over the last two weeks, the daily average of new cases in New Mexico rose by 14%. Hospitalizations rose by 13% but deaths decreased by 26%. The daily average number of cases over the last week was 1,596, or 76 per 100,000. This was the seventh highest number of new cases per 100,000 in the country. Almost 75% of all New Mexicans over age 18 have been “fully vaccinated.”
Los Alamos had a daily average over the last week of about 5 cases, equal to about 27 per 100,000 population. The age distribution of new cases (thanks to Eli Ben-Naim) over the last two weeks is shown in the graphic below. About 93% of the population over 18 years of age in Los Alamos County has been “fully vaccinated.”
Important Pandemic Information
A new variant of concern is circulating in many countries, including the US. Research is being conducted urgently to determine how easily this variant can spread; how sick it makes people; and, to what extent it can evade natural immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, and existing treatments.
CDC has updated its guidance on self-testing for COVID.
(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing/self-testing.html). CDC now says that: “Self-testing is one of several risk-reduction strategies to reduce the chances of COVID-19 transmission. They may be used regardless of vaccination or symptom status.” In line with this, CDC now recommends that people self-test before indoor gatherings with people outside their household.
For the week ending December 2, there were 133,000 new cases among children. They represented about 22% of all new cases; this is perfectly in proportion to the share of children under 18 in our population.
A study of 3,000 US counties by NPR showed that rates of vaccination and death rates varied with political affiliations of county residents. In October 2021, for example, the reddest tenth of all counties in the US had a rate of death from COVID that was 6 times the rate in the bluest tenth of all counties. This analysis controlled for age.
In New Mexico from February 1, 2021 to November 29, 2021, the risk of being infected, hospitalized, and dying was 4.1 times, 5.6 times, and 8.4 times greater if you were “not fully vaccinated” than if you were “fully vaccinated.”
What Can We Do Next?
As concerned citizens, we should be advocating with our elected officials to take evidence-based policies to deal with COVID in the face of the new variant. Travel bans don’t work. However, testing of travelers and strictly quarantining those who are positive can slow the spread of the virus. In addition, we should continue to promote wearing a mask indoors. We know that the duration of robust immunity from the vaccines is relatively short and we should also be getting boosted and encouraging everyone we know to get a booster. Testing ourselves before joining others indoors, like CDC has just recommended, can also be helpful. In addition, we need to be advocating in the strongest ways for ensuring that all countries have access to the vaccines they need to achieve high levels of coverage. It will be very difficult to keep the virus at a “manageable level” in any country as long as it is circulating widely in the rest of the world.
Under those circumstances, it will also be impossible to stop the constant development of new variants. This appears to be especially important for countries with high rates of immunocompromised people, such as HIV-affected people in southern Africa.
“Closer to home,” the universities that have been most successful at stemming transmission on campus have robust testing programs. In addition, some of them recently called for more testing after Thanksgiving to try to stem spread during finals and before the next holiday break. The encouragement of testing by LAPS after Thanksgiving was, in principle, a very sound idea. It appears to have led to about a 1/3 increase in testing of Los Alamos residents over what would have occurred normally. I would encourage LAPS to prepare now for testing as many students as possible immediately before and for a few weeks after the December break. It looks like the demand for such testing is high and that we will not have to do much to encourage such demand.
However, to have a successful testing program the LAPS will need to carefully align the supply of tests and the staffing for any testing event with the demand for testing.
Editor’s Note: Richard Skolnik is the former regional director for health for South Asia at the World Bank. He was the director of an AIDS treatment program for Harvard and taught Global Health at the George Washington University and Yale. He is the author of Global Health 101 and the instructor for Yale/Coursera’s Essentials of Global Health. Skolnik has written this article in his personal capacity.