Walt Disney World in Florida
Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,458th day.
In news we cover today, healthcare providers ranging from physicians to pharmacies are angry that the recovery from the cyberattack that took down United Healthcare’s Change Healthcare payment network is being delayed, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City received $2.6 million for Long Covid-related studies, an actor is suing Disney over his dismissal over vaccine mandates, and it’s the last day to order free at-home Covid tests in the United States.
THE LEDE
Why Comparing SARS-CoV-2 to the Flu is a Dangerous Fallacy of Inconsistency
The U.S. public health system is doing its best to frame the deadly coronavirus pandemic in the same category as the flu. By doing this, it is oversimplifying the dangerous and erratic nature of SARS-CoV-2 and putting millions of people – especially the elderly and immunocompromised – at risk.
The flu is a true seasonal virus. It generally spreads in winter when people remain indoors more. Covid-19, on the other hand, is a year-round erratic virus that mutates frequently and has lulled us – both experts and the public – to believing that the pandemic was over more than once. (Witness President Joe Biden’s 2021 speech given at a party on the White House’s South Lawn with more than 1,000 people in attendance, at which he declared that the U.S. had achieved “independence” from the coronavirus, although he gets some credit for cautioning against complacency with more transmissible variants circulating in the country. Within months of that speech, we were seeing higher numbers of severe illness and hospitalization than had previously been the case.)
This is not unlike when, after the First World War and the Spanish flu had upended life, President Warren G. Harding said that these events altered the perspective of humanity. He argued that the solution was to seek what he termed “normalcy” by restoring life to how it was before the war.
Harding’s detractors of the time tried to belittle the word “normalcy” as a neologism and malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined (by Harding), as opposed to the more accepted term “normality.” The William Safires of the age discussed evidence that “normalcy” had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857, although it was an obscure math term before Harding’s use of it during his campaign. Harding, who had been a newspaper editor (possibly the first U.S. president with that background), did address the original of the word, claiming that only “normalcy” and not “normality” appeared in his dictionary, although he didn’t cite which dictionary this was.
Many, indeed virtually everyone, pined for a return to normalcy once we began to social distance, don face masks, avoid large crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and – once we began the long climb back to a semblance of normalcy – stay home when sick or exposed to disease.
Most public health experts hoped that lessons would be learnt from all this, that this type of mitigation should be practiced for – gasp – other respiratory viruses. (Indeed, it bears mention that our precautions killed off one known circulating lineage of Influenza B virus, known as the Yamagata virus.) But that has yet to happen. Instead, there’s a chorus of voices pushing SARS-CoV-2 to be more like the flu, a scientific impossibility in so many respects it barely deserves a response.
Yet, that is where we are. But it doesn’t have to be where we stay.
LONG COVID
The Rehabilitation Innovation group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York last week received a $2.6 million grant from a Long-Covid-specific nonprofit called the PolyBio Research Foundation. The funds will support two clinical trials. One will test whether two antiviral drugs used to treat HIV can mitigate symptoms of Long Covid. The second will explore whether breaking down tiny blood clots with an enzyme called lumbrokinase can reduce symptoms in patients with Long Covid or chronic fatigue syndrome.
UNITED STATES
Today, Friday, is the final day to order free at-home Covid test kits before the program is suspended. The on-again/off-again offer was most recently made available in mid-November of last year, just in time for the holiday travel season.
The free test kits are available at www.covidtests.gov but (as they say on late-night television), this is a very limited-time offer.
The program was introduced in late January 2022. Deliveries are made by the United States Postal Service within seven to ten days of an order being placed. The government will send four test kits to each residential address that places a request until the program is once again suspended at the end of the current week.
In his third annual State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said that Americans are “writing the greatest comeback story never told” some four years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic and a devastating economic crisis.
“I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” he said before a joint session of Congress. “It doesn’t make news, but in a thousand cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
GLOBAL NEWS
In China, there are no more face masks or social distancing rules. For the first time in almost half a decade, thousands of delegates are attending the National People’s Congress sans face masks.
Unlike in the period since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 in Wuhan, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people across the globe, China’s biggest annual political event were able to see each other’s faces while sipping tea in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
Moreso than any other country, China maintained a draconian anti-Covid policy that resulted in thousands of lockdowns from small towns to major cities, business shutdowns for months, and forced relocation of not only Covid patients but those who came in contact with Covid patients to isolation camps.
The government removed those restrictions when it appeared to be fomenting a revolt against the government.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Disney Television Studio’s Division 20th Television must face a religious discrimination lawsuit for having fired an actor, Rockmond Dunbar, who was in the original cast of the television show “9-1-1,” for refusing to get inoculated against Covid at a time during the pandemic when vaccine mandates were part of the landscape.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee found that the studio may have discriminated against the actor for failing to provide him with a religious exemption. Dunbar contended he was a follower of the Church of Universal Wisdom. Disney, which vetted each exemption request on a case-by-case basis, apparently determined he was not sincere in his beliefs.
The case and several others like it could have implications if a vaccine mandate is reinstated.
GLOBAL STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Friday, March 8.
As of Friday, at press time, the world has recorded 703.98 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.01 million in the last 48 hours, and 7 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 674.93 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, a figure that is virtually unchanged in the past 24 hours.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls as well as the occasional downward or upward adjustment as corrections to case figures warrant.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Friday at press time is 22,039,778, a decrease of 2,300 in the past 24 hours. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,004,378, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 35,400, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 19 months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Friday, recorded 111.62 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.22 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.03 million, and a reported death toll of 533,499.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States. Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.14 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.82 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 709,963, has recorded 38.45 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are South Korea, with 34.57 million cases, as number six; Japan, with 33.8 million cases placing it in the number seven slot; and Italy, with 26.72 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.9 million, and Russia, with 24.01 million, as nine and ten respectively.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending March 2, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on March 8 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 6.5%, and the trend in test positivity is -1% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 1.5%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -21.2%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 15,141, a figure that is down 13.6% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 2.2%, a figure that is up 0.1% in the same period.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Friday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.57 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 3,286 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.7% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE. The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.
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