Studies with Obvious Results -- COVID edition

This is probably true for common colds, flus, and in the past; measles, mumps, chicken pox,…

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Yet another example of correlation <> causation, with an obvious confounder of household size.

I’d be more interested to see this controlled for households that threw birthday parties with outside households. That would be far more obvious.

I just came here to post this. Here’s a link to the actual study:

Question Is there an association between household birthdays, which likely correspond to informal social gatherings, and COVID-19 infection?

Findings This cross-sectional study used administrative health care data on 2.9 million households from the first 45 weeks of 2020 and found that, among households in the top decile of county COVID-19 prevalence, those with birthdays had 8.6 more diagnoses per 10 000 individuals compared with households without a birthday, a relative increase of 31% of county-level prevalence, an increase in COVID-19 diagnoses of 15.8 per 10 000 persons after a child birthday, and an increase in COVID-19 diagnoses of 5.8 per 10 000 among households with an adult birthday.

Hey, kids spread covid at birthday parties! Who would have guessed?

I rather doubt that “achieving a birthday” causes infectious disease. It seems far more plausible that birthday parties actually do facilitate the spread of covid. I mean, they only reason they wouldn’t is if it were true that kids don’t spread covid. And sadly, the evidence is emerging that they do.

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But that study is nearly impossible to do.

Covid deniers/downplayers that continue to claim that children don’t get sick and don’t spread the disease, despite the evidence to the contrary?

Anecdote:
I was out to dinner with a doctor over the weekend. She was incredibly disturbed by having to intubate a numerous unvaccinated people in their 20s over the past week.

Incubate? Is that a typo for intubate?

That is sad. :worried:

Yes, a weird autocomplete by my phone.

I even Google to make sure I was using the right word, then typed it wrong.

Smh

I have a friend who works at a hospital in MO, she said they’ve had a strong up-tick in the number of pts admitted for COVID. She also said it seems like they are skewing younger, which may be the new variant that’s hitting MO, or it may just be that so many of the age 65+ crowd is vaxxed (or both). And she noted that none of her COVID pts admitted to the hospital are vaxxed. Shocking.

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As best as I can tell, it’s both. The current variants are more dangerous to younger people, and fewer young adults are vaccinated. (For deaths there’s a third factor, which is that a lot of the elders who were most at risk have already died.) My state hasn’t seen an uptick in cases, yet, but the average age of those hospitalized and killed by covid keeps dropping.

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“As immunizations slow, the delta variant has become the predominant form of the virus in the region. Aaron Schekorra, a spokesman for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, said it makes up 93% of the random sample of cases that the county is sending for analysis, up from 70% three weeks ago.”

If the new strain is now 93% of cases, would a reasonable conclusion be that they would be looking at roughly 7% of the current caseload without the variant?

I don’t think so. To a large extent, catching one variant prevents you from catching another.

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