H5N1

How deadly was China’s Covid wave?

Via The New York Times: How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave? Excerpt:

After China relaxed the world’s most stringent Covid-19 restrictions in December, the virus exploded. Hints of the surge were everywhere: Hospitals turned away patients. Crematories were overwhelmed with bodies. A wave of top scholars died.  

But China’s official Covid death toll for the entire pandemic remains strikingly low: 83,150 people as of Feb. 9. That number is a vast undercount, researchers believe, in part because it only includes infected people who died in hospitals, excluding anyone who died at home.  

While a precise accounting is impossible, epidemiologists have been working to piece together the mystery of the outbreak that accelerated in December. Four separate academic teams have converged on broadly similar estimates: China’s Covid wave may have killed between a million and 1.5 million people.  

All of the researchers consulted by The New York Times cautioned that without reliable data from China, the estimates should be understood as informed guesses, with significant uncertainty — although the estimates fit the evidence far better than the official figures do.  

The question of how many people died has enormous political relevance for the ruling Communist Party. Early in the pandemic, China’s harsh lockdowns largely kept the coronavirus at bay. Xi Jinping, the top leader, has portrayed that earlier success as evidence of China’s superiority over the West, a claim that would be hard to maintain with a high death toll.  

The differences between China’s figures and researchers’ estimates are dramatic. The official numbers would give China the lowest death rate per capita of any major country over the entirety of the pandemic. But at the estimated levels of mortality, China would already have surpassed official rates of death in many Asian countries that never clamped down as long or as aggressively. 

At the same time, China would rank below Germany, Italy, the United States and other countries where outbreaks accelerated before vaccines became available.  

Two of the estimates were in papers published in academic journals or posted for peer review, while two other analyses were shared by epidemiologists in response to queries from The Times.  

Researchers used a variety of approaches to gauge how many people may have been infected and — a crucial question — how effective China’s homegrown vaccines were at preventing death. Some drew on how the virus behaved in past outbreaks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where data was more reliable, and a few used detailed computer models to simulate the epidemic.  

Still others turned to official sampling data, based on China’s systematic testing of hundreds of thousands of people, to develop a model that estimated deaths to be far beyond the government's tally.  

“If the data say what we think they say, this was an explosive wave,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bird flu spreads to new countries, threatens non-stop "war" on poultry

Via Reuters: Bird flu spreads to new countries, threatens non-stop "war" on poultry. Excerpt:

CHICAGO, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Avian flu has reached new corners of the globe and become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to poultry, according to veterinarians and disease experts, who warn it is now a year-round problem.  

Reuters spoke to more than 20 experts and farmers on four continents who said the prevalence of the virus in the wild signals that record outbreaks will not abate soon on poultry farms, ramping up threats to the world's food supply. They warned that farmers must view the disease as a serious risk all year, instead of focusing prevention efforts during spring migration seasons for wild birds.

Outbreaks of the virus have continued in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, undefeated by summer heat or winter cold snaps, since a strain arrived in the United States in early 2022 that was genetically similar to cases in Europe and Asia.

Egg prices set records after the disease wiped out tens of millions of hens last year, putting a staple source of cheap protein out of reach to some of the world's poorest at a time the global economy is reeling from high inflation.   

Wild birds are primarily responsible for spreading the virus, according to experts. Waterfowl like ducks can carry the disease without dying and introduce it to poultry through contaminated feces, saliva and other means.  

Farmers' best efforts to protect flocks are falling short.  

In the United States, Rose Acre Farms, the country's second-largest egg producer, lost about 1.5 million hens at a Guthrie County, Iowa, production site last year, even though anyone who entered barns was required to shower first to remove any trace of the virus, Chief Executive Marcus Rust said.

A company farm in Weld County, Colorado, was infected twice within about six months, killing more than 3 million chickens, Rust said. He thinks wind blew the virus in from nearby fields where geese defecated.  

"We got nailed," Rust said. "You just pull your hair out."  

The United States, Britain, France and Japan are among countries that have suffered record losses of poultry over the past year, leaving some farmers feeling helpless.  

"Avian flu is occurring even in a new poultry farm with modern equipment and no windows, so all we could do now is ask God to avoid an outbreak," said Shigeo Inaba, who raises chickens for meat in Ibaraki prefecture near Tokyo.

Goodbye, Johns Hopkins covid tracker

Via The Washington Post: Goodbye, Johns Hopkins covid tracker. Excerpt:

When the pandemic hit, the federal government struggled to publish snapshots of the virus’ spread.  

So, academics and journalists quickly filled the void, creating new tools with near real-time estimates of the unfolding pandemic. Since January 2020, Johns Hopkins University has operated one of the most prominent resources for tracking covid-19 case counts and deaths across the world.   

After more than three years, the university will stop updating its tracker on March 10 as the country has moved into a different stage of the pandemic with a different data flow. But the story of the online dashboard — a $13 million project that’s been viewed over 2.5 billion times — is more than just about a tool to track the pandemic. It underscores the country’s fragmented public health systems and its decentralized and underfunded reporting system, which hobbled the U.S. pandemic response.    

“The thing that became the biggest surprise was the importance and reliance on it by everyone: by the general public and decision-makers and everyone in between,” said Lauren Gardner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering who started the global tracker with one of her PhD students.  

“Hopkins filled a gap that nobody else was able to do,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at University of Washington’s IHME. “So all of us, reporters, us in academia, we went to Hopkins to get the data.”  

Why now?  

The Johns Hopkins researchers point out that they don’t believe the pandemic has ended — and the move to stop updating the tracker shouldn’t be conflated as such. Instead, the decision comes amid a different phase of the pandemic and was made for two main reasons.   

The first: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have built up their capacity to share covid data with the general public, which Gardner called the “appropriate” entities to be providing this information long term.   

The second: The quality of the tracker depends on the quality of publicly available data. At the beginning of the pandemic, states, counties and even cities were providing daily covid updates, which scrapers for the tracker could collect data from. But that’s not the case anymore, and that has a direct impact on what the dashboard can do.   

Looking forward  

The country has made some improvements on its data collection efforts, but there’s still a ways to go, according to several experts.   

Beth Blauer, an associate vice provost at Johns Hopkins University who helped run the Coronavirus Resource Center, said that many states closed up their covid reporting with little information on any next steps.  

“Our big question is whether or not they’re making long-term investments in critical public health data infrastructure to navigate lots of challenges that they face,” Blauer said, citing the opioid epidemic and economic mobility.