Head of Macroeconomic Modelling at Banco de España. He/him. Views and opinions are my own.
Current status: wearing FFP3 mask, worried about covid sequelae.
New data from the official Spanish health survey. The share of the population that has a chronic illness now stands 9.8 standard deviations above its prepandemic average. Hospitalizations, 5.9 standard deviations above its average. All age groups doing badly.
New wastewater data for Spain: the wave is accelerating, with Rt up to 1.45 this fortnight. Currently 6.65% of the population has covid (one in 15 people). Four of the 53 stations sampled, including one in Madrid, are at their highest viral concentration of the whole pandemic.
There's a new paper today by
@zalaly
et al using the VA database. As always, very interesing.
I went for the tables under "supplementary information" and compiled these graphs to show how the health of their "uninfected controls" is doing.
The source of this data is: barómetro sanitario del CIS. It's a survey of 2600 people, selected so they would be representative of the Spanish population.
Still, I think what we are seeing is worsening health in the general population. It is happening worldwide, because of covid.
My usual graph for Spain, and my usual link to the article we published last year on the economic effects this can have.
New covid wastewater data for Spain today (VATar). Exponential growth continues, although slightly lower (Rt at around 1.2, down from 1.35 a month ago). Madrid seems to be ahead of the rest and is already looking awful.
If growth continues at this rate, the next data release (in two weeks) would break all of our records: this wave would reach the maximum incidence of the whole pandemic. Let's see...
So much for covid being over 🤦🏼♀️
First, the reason for doing this. I saw the difference between infected and uninfected is narrowing with time. This could be because they're getting better, because the badly hit are dying, or because the controls are getting infected without testing and showing up as positives.
Second, important caveats. I don't have the data so these groups are not matched. Using a different paper for the first point makes that worse. And there's aging in the individuals tracked in the database so some growth is to be expected even if nothing unusual is happening.
I expected this week we could surpass the maximum covid incidence of the whole pandemic in Spain. It didn’t happen, the wastewater indicator for the fortnight is going down. The change also affected my weekly interpolator.
It was rainy, though: let’s see in a couple of weeks.
1. Oklahoma announces it is the 13th state to find
#H5N1
#birdflu
in dairy cattle. In fact, it was more likely the 10th (or earlier); this detection is based on a sample collected in April. The test was only recently run. How exactly does that work? h/t
@0bFuSc8
If you train a lot but fail to prevent infection, particularly if it's right at the time of competition, you were not cheated out of anything. You just failed, predictably.
Now to be worried about the long term consequences of heavy exercise while infected.
The fastest man in the world was cheated out of a gold medal today.
I don't blame Noah Lyles for running (and later collapsing) while sick with Covid.
What failed him is the system around him that should have protected him and all the other Olympic athletes.
Lyles even wore a
@Yash25571056
Even more relevant: 20.6% of the total population answering the poll said they had long covid, and 7% said it affected their work or employment.
Everything is looking so bleak...
@MelpomeneMel
I don't have much info about the current situation. I know they are now structurally overwhelmed, with waiting lists getting longer even though we're achieving record numbers of attended patients.
@DaniBeckman
@zalaly
Only that it's somewhat likely that this is the case. It could also be that these years have been very hard on this population and other factors have made this. But yes, I believe it was the virus.
I believe it's too late to fix the VIRUS mess by now. Whatever the virus does, we'll just find out. Maybe we'll be lucky, maybe we won't. It's the virus making the call now.
Where VIRUS is any of covid, mpox, H5N1.
We're just virus food now, apparently.
That H5N1 thing is getting very serious very fast. This preprint describes an outbreak that, if I found the correct denominator, killed 85% of the total population of elephant seals at Peninsula Valdes. For pups they report a mortality of 95% of the total population. Very scary.
Good data today
JN.1 only managed to infect around 20% of the population in Spain. Seems lower than in central Europe.
We are now at around 0.7 infections per person per year (rough estimate, biased downwards, but comparison with the past should be valid).
Awful but improving.
If yoy want to incorporate a possible prepandemic trend, numbers don't change much. We would be 11.5 standard deviations above trend in chronic illness (the trend is upwards but std of the deviations from that trend are smaller) and 6.7 deviations above trend in hospitalizations.
@leanhealth
Note the charts for Madrid don't cover the whole pandemic, because I got bored at typing the numbers 😅
The national graph does cover all the available data, since 2020
@JPWeiland
National Spanish wastewater numbers already show the start of a wave, but in Madrid in particular, which has more up-to-date data, it's still flat (at very high levels) even though pirola has been dominant here since late November. Puzzling. I guess it will start rising soon.
@1goodtern
I'm noticing some covid-unaware people are lately starting to realize the constant health issues in their families are not normal. Particularly those with kids, because they've had more rounds and because the kids are being hammered in ways that shouldn't be common.
I hold two very controversial opinions:
- that genocide is bad no matter who does it and who is the victim
- that this shouldn't be a controversial opinion
@wysyq
I get the data from the vatar pdf graph using
@ankit_rohatgi
's webplotdigitizer (), change the scale from log to linear, then rescale it from virus concentration to infected people using the overlap with the four 2020 serologic studies in Spain (enecovid)
Shape of my worries lately:
What will we find is the LD50 of covid? That is, how many reinfections end up causing the death in, say, 5 years, of half the population?
I'm worried that no matter how high the number, we are going to reach it. Is it 10? Easy. 25? Just wait and see.
@ejustin46
@LongDesertTrain
@shay_fleishon
@JosetteSchoenma
There could be some of that, but I think variants are playing a bigger role than just time.
In any case: maybe in the US it's not so easy to se because you're aggregating regions with different past waves. In Spain it's super clear that sinde delta it's variants driving waves.
@1goodtern
My question is: how many rounds of infecctions does it take for 50% of a population to be disabled or dead? Because it may be a high number, but no matter how high it is, at the current rate, we seem on track to reach it.
The wholesale price of milk in the US is going up, the one for eggs is skyrocketing. I'm going to guess the H5N1 situation over there is NOT under control...
@JPWeiland
Latest wastewater data still doesn't show a new wave emerging, we keep the very high baseline we've had for months, with 0.8-1.2% of the population infected at any given time.
This graph is for Madrid, released yesterday. Latest national data is two weeks old.
@d_le_nen
There's probably some of that, but mostly: here in Spain we had a relatively small JN.1 wave, with "just" 21% of the population infected, vs e.g. 44% in Zurich and 58% in Netherlands. So it makes sense that here the JN.1 descendants would create a bigger wave that starts sooner.
@SigfridoErguido
No, I use the pdf. There's a graph there, but it's useless because the vertical scale is log. I take the data from there using
@ankit_rohatgi
's webplotdigitizer (now ) and bring it to a linear scale.
The grape seed extract study is a strong one & I’m surprised how little people talk about it.
Just one dose of GSE caused blood extracted from the patient an hour later to inhibit viral entry into cells & it also inhibits viral replication.
@ejustin46
@LongDesertTrain
@shay_fleishon
@JosetteSchoenma
It will not be surprising, I've done that for every wave since Alpha. I don't have it with the wastewater data, though, I used to do it with deaths and running a twin-variant SIR model in order to see how the wave was coming.
Number of records broken at 2024 Olympics: not bad at all
(I was expecting to see an effect from widespread covid infections, I don't see it, at least at first glance)
@LongDesertTrain
@ejustin46
@shay_fleishon
@JosetteSchoenma
If I may: I believe in this case variants explain both the big wave in Spain and the not-so-big effect in other places. We had a relatively small JN1 wave, it makes sense that the descendants have a bigger and earlier effect here (fewer and less fit antibodies).
The results of that paper can be explained by two factors. It could be that JN.1 has worse symptoms and more viral shedding, or that now only the more severe cases get a PCR. I'd go with the second one.
@DrElbourne
@healingfromlc
In Spain we're just reaching 2.5, and we were around 2 in March
(I'm using the serologic studies for 2020, wastewater from sep-20 onwards, and the overlap to calibrate the latter)
@LongDesertTrain
If that's the reason behind our current wave, it packs a punch. Beware though: we had a relatively small JN.1 wave, I wouldn't necessarily expect similar waves in places that had a lot more infections a few months ago.
New wastewater data for Spain: the wave is accelerating, with Rt up to 1.45 this fortnight. Currently 6.65% of the population has covid (one in 15 people). Four of the 53 stations sampled, including one in Madrid, are at their highest viral concentration of the whole pandemic.
The Pirola wave in Spain has started
With today's wastewater data I estimate 3.2% of the population currently infected (1-in-31).
Timing is awful, we'll reach the holidays with a lot of people carrying the virus to their family gatherings.
@crazkittensmile
@AsianVikingGirl
Hang in there, you're doing amazing
(We're also hermits but I got it once, in 2022, my partner also once,in 2023; accidents happen; still trying to keep the count as low as possibl)
@LongDesertTrain
@ejustin46
@shay_fleishon
@JosetteSchoenma
(and maybe our JN1 wave was relatively small because we had big BQ and XBB waves, because our BA2 wave was smallish because the BA1 one was huge and dragged on)
(Outdated table here, JN1d for descendants)
@JPWeiland
Apart from wastewater, my secondary indicator is just looking at anecdotal evidence. Message from a friend who works at an elder care home, a couple of days ago: "it's unbelievable how many people around me have covid right now".
Here we go again: new data from VATar (Spanish wastewater) in the last month shows the start of a new wave. Extrapolating one more week, I estimate right now 1.2% of the Spanish population has covid (one of each 84 people).
@JPWeiland
Most indicators stoped in 2023. There's some regional stuff, and some data on positivity rates, but I wouldn't trust it: from every case I've heard of lately, they are actively avoiding testing. Doctors get mad at you if you tell them you tested yourself and it was positive.
Due to enormous and collaborative effort from the
@nextstrain
team,
@hamesjadfield
@trvrb
and of course
@USDA
, we now have the USDA cattle sequences on Nextstrain: visualized with new, 2-year builds.
@LongDesertTrain
@cathleen28
@RickABright
They talk about whether it "spread efficiently by droplets through the air", so, if I use my "stupid WHO terminology designed to obfuscate things to language that people understand" dictionary, it means there's airborne transmission and 1/3 ferrets got infected that way and died
@SBW25phi2
@skymelilemyks
Indeed. Go to , studies, search for "sanitario" and you'll get links to all the waves of this survey. Takes a while to type it all but it's not too bad. No idea if there's a version in English.
@JPWeiland
So far, the French numbers you shared put it mid-field on my table of takeover speeds
BA1 > Delta > BA2 = BA4/5 > JN1 > Alpha > XBB = BQ1 > EG5
@DeviJustice
@1goodtern
Since they seem to like tales: "Your immune system is designed to get you over the age of having and raising kids, which means 35 at most. So it will take a few infections and diseases and then you're down." Not true but closer than what they believe, and more useful.
Shocking study about neurological impact of SC2 infection in dogs. Published in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal..
If you own a dog - or a brain- this study is worth taking a look at. (H/t
@outbreakupdates
)
#maskup
#itsnotjustacold
@Kenneth33071904
@_CatintheHat
In Spain the average is currently "close to 3".
My calculation, using wastewater data from sep2020, and calibrating the conversion into cases using serologic surveys from June and November of 2020.
What kind of new horrors are awaiting us in 2024? We will know soon enough
(common by now: the virus shows its evolutionary powers, promising more waves, while we are still dealing with the ascent of the last one; it doesn't even allow the hope that this may be the last one)
Something’s happening here: BA.2.86 and the furin cleavage site (FCS)
The FCS has been highly conserved in all SARS-CoV-2 lineages. Why is it disappearing so much more frequently in BA.2.86/JN.1? 1/16
@JosetteSchoenma
Yes. I remember exposed kids in Mallorca refusing to stay in their hotel because lockdown of infected/contacts was not legally required so they said no and went partying.