Global Covid Numbers -- December 31, 2022

Updates

January 3, 2023: from a reader who corresponds with me frequently regarding the Bakken, sent this comment following the original post below:

I send out a note and a little collection of Covid news most Sundays, time permitting....since you've had a couple posts up on it recently, i figured you might be interested in my short take...

The CDC says new Covid cases are down 17.3% over the past week, probably because the bean counters in several states took the week off, and since they're only publishing one aggregate national figure for the week, there's really nothing there to go on...checking https://biobot.io/data/, which aggregates Covid particles found in wastewater nationally, would suggest infections are rising at a 12% weekly rate, and that current levels of the virus in sewer water are already higher now than at any time other than during last winter’s initial Omicron wave...biobot breaks that national total down into four regions, and it's clear that surging infections in the Northeast are driving the national increase; they're about 70% higher than those in the South and Midwest, and nearly 3 times the levels in the west...

what really gave me pause this week were the latest variant proportions (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions) the CDC now shows that 40.5% of our new cases were the XBB.1.5 variant, which they didn't even show separately last week, when they aggregated XBB and XBB.1 totals together at 18.3% (XBB is now 3.6%)...Dr Eric Topol, who's become an internet authority on Covid, believes XBB evolved into XBB.1.5 in New York, so it appears we're seeing the emergence of a new mutation that is contagious enough to push all the previous super contagious variants out of the way...XBB and BQ now account for about 90% of our cases....

So we're pretty screwed, virtually back to square one-- this study, from scientists at Columbia University and the University of Michigan, published in the journal Cell, explains where we're at quite succinctly: 

Alarming antibody evasion properties of rising SARSCoV-2 BQ and XBB subvariants --(pdf).

In brief: Recent BQ and XBB subvariants of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrate dramatically increased ability to evade neutralizing antibodies, even those from people who received the bivalent mRNA booster or who are immunized and had previous breakthrough Omicron infection. Additionally, both BQ and XBB are completely resistant to bebtelovimab, meaning there are now no clinically authorized therapeutic antibodies effective against these circulating variants.

Comment: I am much less alarmed/concerned. We should see how this plays out in the next three months.

 Original Post

From two days ago, link here. I assume this is a function of the holiday season in the US when many state agencies were closed and data was not being reported. Nonetheless, it is quite striking.

Having said that the numbers were absolutely consistent with the numbers about six days ago. 

What's the USA doing differently than Asia?

The table below is ranked by number of new cases which mirrors closes the ranking by active cases for the first several countries. 

Thailand doesn't report active cases and Vietnam's numbers are suspicious.