The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 420 (920)

The New York Times' Virus Briefing today was on pandemic data; it was not pretty. It seems that each health department has its own system that may or may not connect to other departments' systems or even to the CDC's system. There is more hand-entering of data than the public knows. And the data entered is often not specified by variant. When Omicron first appeared, it took more time than it should have to assess just how deadly it might be. No national data has been collected on breakthrough infections. Because I am a quilter, I loved the descriptors "bewildering patchwork of information" and "big jumble of different studies and different subsets that were stitched together." Fixing the problems will be costly. I was not too pleased to read that much of the data sharing between states and the CDC is on a voluntary basis. Unfortunately, the only time problems such as this come to light is during emergencies. After the emergency is over, it's out of sight, out of mind.

Quickies: WHO reports that up to 20 percent of infected people in Europe have developed long covid. Doctors and immunologists are saying that, in general, a person should wait four to six months after a covid shot or case before getting a booster. That's longer than I've seen elsewhere.

Some background on covid vaccinations for children: Over 1,400 children have died from covid, at least 533 of those under the age of five. This makes covid one of the top 10 causes of childhood mortality. Children under the age of five became eligible for vaccination on June 18. Vaccinations peaked within two weeks. Some 6.2 percent of children under five have been vaccinated compared with around 40 percent for children between the ages of five and 11. A survey analyst with the Kaiser Family Foundation notes. "One of the most commonly cited things was the sense that the vaccine is too new, that there's not been enough testing, especially for young children, and that more research is needed." Families said things such as "...if there's something bad that's gonna happen, I just don't want to know about it." Over half of the parents surveyed said they believed that the vaccine is a bigger health risk than covid. The big "however," though, is that 40 percent of parents of unvaccinated children said that they would get the children vaccinated if they were required to do so. School vaccine mandates appear long-gone unfortunately.