https://biobot.io/data/covid-19

This is normally the time of year when our lull starts to kick in, but there's spikes still happening all over the country. It's frankly rather depressing to look at the last 6 month view and over and over seeing county after county stop reporting data and then just seeing random counties spiking at an all time high. Whatever wave we went through over the holidays is still going strong. Mask up, nasal spray, and be careful out there when you have to go out.

ngl, I'm curious to see if this is the end of lulls at a nationwide level. doomer We'll have to see how much immunity all these JN.1 infections are giving people to the other variants out there.

  • TheModerateTankie [any]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Here's the CDC wastewater data https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance

    The baseline seems too high for after a major covid wave, it's higher than the fall wave we got when schools restarted. Wtf. Seems like either people are getting re-infected during the same wave, or a lot of people just aren't clearing the virus? Is it reinfecting people who got covid in the fall, extending the wave, since their immunity is probably wearing off by now?

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      Is it reinfecting people who got covid in the fall, extending the wave, since their immunity is probably wearing off by now?

      1. I think so. Maybe. I think JN.1 may be like an escape variant like Omnicron was. People's previous infections just aren't providing enough immunity to it.
      2. Because people's scattered immunities are so out of sync, we're not seeing just one big spike. We're seeing a spike in county A, while county B has enough people with immunity to prevent spiking, but then county C spikes off of county A and then county B wears off just in time to spike off County C. Just extrapolate that out on a much bigger scale, basically. But when you average all that out on a nationwide scale, you don't get the large spike like with omnicron in Jan 2022, you get a long hump like in summer of 2022. The amount of infections are just as many, maybe even more, but they're less pronounced because they're spread out over time and geographic area.

      This is why I've been super worried about an endless wave, because that's where we're basically heading. Also, keep in mind that as that graph has gone on, we've been losing monitoring locations, there are more and more spikes we're just not seeing but are almost assuredly happening. The average we're seeing has likely been smaller and less accurate over time when compared to reality. So not only are we heading for an endless wave nationwide, or possibly already living in one, but they've taken all the resources we had to figure out when we might be in localized lull so we could try and live around it.

      Edit: pretty safe bet that the reason biobot regularly shows the northeast leading the rest of the country for waves is because there's far more monitoring happening there.

      Show

      • TheModerateTankie [any]
        ·
        9 months ago

        Because people's scattered immunities are so out of sync, we're not seeing just one big spike. We're seeing a spike in county A, while county B has enough people with immunity to prevent spiking, but then county C spikes off of county A and then county B wears off just in time to spike off County C.

        That's how it's been in my area for the past year. My town just started getting hit a couple weeks ago, and is probably peaking now. Meanwhile a town 100 miles away had their covid wave in early January. We have a wave every 2-3 months, so I wonder if that's just how everything is now. A big wave shows up when enough places are in sync, but if they aren't then it appears as an extended high base level over several months and slowly tapers off until a new variant emerges and restarts the cycle, but maybe it won't taper off this year.

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          9 months ago

          Yeah, that's what I've been suspecting for a while now. You gotta figure there's more than 3000 counties in the US and we're barely even scratching the surface. The amount of spikes we've not been seeing must be just wild. Stopping lockdowns and masking was made only more chaotic by the fact that it wasn't coordinated in any way. So some places probably missed entire mini waves and it's variants gone wild out there until we get one like JN.1 or Omicron that "wipes the board."