This is a COVID update. I’ve been posting only every 2 weeks for a while, but this has been an interesting week, so I’m posting a little early.

New case numbers for the US, California, and San Diego County show that the second Omicron wave, I’ll call it the BA.2 wave, has peaked, and numbers are now dropping sharply.

For some reason, my numbers are a little erratic for the last week for the US. This is likely because of irregular reporting by places that Johns Hopkins gets information from, so I’ll also show the US data from Worldometer.

Anyway, new case numbers for all three regions are coming down now, and deaths have still not started to come up, despite us being 6 weeks into the BA.2 peak. John Campbell has also pointed out that new deaths have not tracked with new cases, so the BA.2 Omicrons seems to be less pathogenic than previous versions.

And yes, since cases are less severe and over-the-counter testing is available, infections are likely much higher than official reporting suggests.

Still not quite over: Since I had Omicron in January, and current strains are still in the Omicron family, I am not concerned about getting COVID again right now. So the Pandemic is essentially over for me, but people are still getting COVID.

I was with a buddy this week who was very fatigued and miserable, just like I was, but he didn’t have any life threatening symptoms, just like me. So just a word of encouragement for those who have COVID now or will get it in the coming weeks. You can be really miserable and not be dying! You generally only need to go to the hospital if your blood oxygen is low. Different sources have a different definition of “low”, some say below 90 and some say below 95. Feel free to chime in on this if you’re a health care worker! Get yourself a high quality pulse oximeter so you can reassure yourself if your oxygen is normal! Some medical networks also have a messaging system where you can ask your doctor COVID questions without going in.

Also, if you haven’t had COVID recently, supplement with Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc. A physician friend of mine says he has had patients who’ve had both Delta and Omicron, so “recently” means since December.

Don’t fear, but be smart!
Erik

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June 5th, 2022
Post Script:
Mark Foreman sent me a paper he found describing 47 cases in Denmark in which people who had been infected with Omicron BA.1 were also infected with BA.2 just a few months later. The cases were all in young, unvaccinated people who had had mild symptoms from their BA.1 infections.

Since BA.1 and BA.2 are so similar, I find this a little baffling, but my being baffled doesn’t discount the data. The data must speak for itself. One possibility suggested by the mild symptoms is that the patients had a low dose exposure to BA.1, so had mild symptoms, and perhaps only mounted a medium immune response to BA.1, allowing infection by BA.2. This is just a guess of course.

In all cases, the BA.2 infections in this group produced mild symptoms.

A very interesting paper that will perhaps give more insight into how our immune systems interact with this disease!