Massachusetts vs New Jersey

 Who would have thunk it?

The NY Times presents a tale of how Massachusetts is vaccinating the 75+ set. They note:

This week, Massachusetts began a first-in-the-nation experiment, offering vaccinations to those who accompany people who are 75 and older to mass vaccination sites. The plan was intended to ease access problems for older people, who have struggled to book online appointments and travel to sports stadiums. Right away, it met with criticism from state legislators and some public health experts, who said it could result in scarce doses going to young, healthy people. It also gave rise to an unusual online market, as entrepreneurial Massachusetts residents sought to forge caregiving relationships at top speed.

Whereas here in NJ if you are over 75 just try and find a place. As I noted after hundreds of attempts I think I found one down at the Delaware border some time in March. In NY the Gov now seems to have let us say reduced the elderly population while here in NJ The Banker and Nurse Ratchet are in my opinion and in my experience ensuring that only the survival of the fittest 75+ make it until June! 

We 75+ survivors ought to find a bond and then make certain we remember this teams actions. NJ seems in my opinion and in my experience to be the only state acting in such a manner.

How Wrong Can He Be?

 Columnists often have a hubris that exceeds one's wildest dreams. One of the more "self enlightened" of the NY Times states:

The problem has been that over the last few decades only a few veins have really been paying off and changing lives. Discoveries in information technology have obviously been massive — the internet and the smartphone. Thanks in part to public investment, clean energy innovation has been fast and plentiful. The price of solar modules has declined by 99.6 percent since 1976.

His claim as regards to public investment, akin to the Obama claim that "you did not build that", shows gross ignorance of the facts. 

The event which allowed the explosion of the current information age was the breakup of AT&T in 1981. Judge Greene in a simple act ended the controlling monopoly who was struggling to control all communications in the US. If he had not done so we most likely would not have what we have today, for better or worse. This act unleashed massive "private" investments in many areas of communications. AT&T would have squashed the Internet. The free market and entrepreneurs made it a reality.

The fact is that when the Government gets in the mix it stops any and all innovation. But one must look now at the new monopolists, namely the West Coast mobs who are rebuilding the controlling environment. We see the restructuring of a hand in glove relationship between Washington and the monopolists. So who really needs a new App. Did these folks lend a hand in this pandemic? Hardly.

But what has arisen here is the mass development and implementation of bio technologies that will define the rest of our century. mRNA vaccines are but a first step in the exploding area of immune technology. The West coast monopolists will pale by comparison since the biotechs will bring truly life enhancing and improving results. Instead of a new App we may very well have the means for targeted cancer therapy, targeting malignant cell markers and then using one's immune system to eliminate the malignancies, and doing so on a scale never before see. 

Was public investment the driver. In this case it was but it was necessary to survive, as were the developments in WW II. These pundits have a true blind spot, focusing on the past. Biotech is the future, and the positive side of this pandemic is its unleashing.

Sequencing

 We have advocated sequencing a reasonable percent of known infected individuals for the corona virus infection. We have also advocated that such sequenced results should be made available on an open sourced data based so that anyone can have access and provide analysis. The virus is about 30,000 nucleotides long, not that large and the spike is some 3,000 nucleotides. 

Using NGS one could expect that sequencing is a readily done process. Science notes:

But to date, fewer than 100 coronavirus samples have made it to his sequencers at the McDonnell Genome Institute, and the United States remains nearly blind to several coronavirus strains that have recently upended the course of the pandemic. “We have it all worked out but there's not a lot of takers,” Milbrandt says of his center's sequencing abilities. “We are getting more inquiries from the press than from people who need the information. … Some of us have pipelines available—they are just not being utilized.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plans to rapidly change that by coordinating a national surveillance system for coronavirus variants. Scientists and public health experts welcome the plan. “The hardware is set up, the people are trained, the infrastructure is in place,” says genome scientist Chris Mason of Weill Cornell Medicine. “It's just a big question: Who's gonna pay for it?”

What is amazing is that we can sequence a human genome of 3 billion nucleotides for a few hundred dollars and one millionth that seems to be an insurmountable process. 

In my opinion this is another of a long line of gross failures of the CDC. I would suggest sequencing at least one percent of all infected and doing so on a near real time basis. That way one hope we can both see the new mutant/variant and more importantly modify vaccines accordingly.

It is truly amazing that no matter the Administration we have these incessant missteps and outright bumblings.

Vaccine Equity

 The NY Times asserts:

The same goes for vaccination equity. We know that the 32 million or so shots that have been administered so far have gone disproportionately to wealthier, whiter Americans. But we don’t know exactly how bad those disparities are — only about half of all vaccinations logged so far include racial data — and we don’t know what’s behind that gap. Some people blame the inequity on vaccine hesitancy in marginalized communities; others point to online registration systems and clinic hours that make shots more difficult to access for low-income Americans. Each of those problems has different solutions.

Now let me tell my New Jersey story.  After a month of multiple tries I finally got an appointment for March. It is a site 125 miles from my house. I am denied closer sites by the counties. Thus I must drive a total of 500 miles, two round trips, and hope that the appointment is not cancelled when I arrive. But if one is 29 and says they are a smoker they go to the front of the line. The highly mixed counties prohibit those from the more affluent counties to use the State paid services. Thus we must find a niche in the midst of the pine lands. I guess if we don't recover they can dump the bodies out there somewhere.

Thanks to our grossly incompetent State officials, whose sole goal is a photo op or two, we get 80 year olds driving down to the Delaware border. Did I say Delaware, interesting!

NJ 2021 02 06

 Here we go. Things may be looking up but we have that football thing tomorrow. Also as a note, my grand daughter went off to UMass Amherst. Her classmates were partying for the first week and 200+ came down with the virus. Someone should tell them it will last their entire life and perhaps get worse! I guess their grand-kids will be paying for that mess.

Now to this weeks data.

1. County and Town

 The chart below shows Doubling Time vs Infections per PoP. The idea was to see if denser infections meant shorter doubling times. There seems to be no such result.

We continue to see the Dover cluster and the County seems more incompetent than the State!

There are a few hot spots with low doubling times such as Chester Borough.

The new per county and town seem to be declining. Beware football!

2. Vaccinations

Now we start looking at vaccinations. The chart below is the prevalence vs Sites. There seems to be a lower prevalence for more sites making some sense.

Then we looked at sites vs income. Hunterdon county has the highest income and greatest number of sites. Clearly if you are wealthy you get preference. Guess The Banker may be fund raising here for the next election. Also with the data you can't hide it!

The chart below is percent vaccinated and infected. As of today it exceeds 20%.

The breakout looks good. Namely we have 20% total and the vaccinated is 13%. That is now double the infected and a slow but steady growth. Except in Morris County.

The chart below is the incremental vaccinations per day. We are slowly averaging 1.6 million per day. However is really should be twice that to get to a saturation level. Perhaps J&J vaccinations may help.

The chart below is the growth compared to the Biden Chart, which was already being achieved as of day 1!

3. Mortality

Death rates are still high. Not clear just why. They are well below early a year ago but at that point The Banker's decision to infest the LTCs killed off thousands quickly.

The total long term deaths seem to be dropping.

And the LTC numbers seem to be decreasing. BUT, they should be at zero at this point. There should be some investigation on why they are above zero!

4. NJ Stats

The doubling time is increasing and is back to where we were in mid May of last year.

The State incidence is dropping

As is the County, but slowly

State prevalence is still high

As is the County. The 1:200 prevalence dictates maintaining small crowd size.

Thought So

 

The above is the number of vaccine sites per 100,000 PoPs. As I has suspected Morris County is the lowest with just 1. Warren and Hunterdon, the richer counties have almost an order of magnitude more. There is clear bias in these sites. If one lives in Morris one must go down to Salem, 125 miles south on the Delaware border to seek a vaccine. It is illegal to go to any surrounding counties. The main groups infected here are Hispanics in Dover and thus this may be considered a biased event against them. I wonder if The Banker and Nurse Ratchet even notice!

Data is so annoying, is it not?