Your Local Epidemiologist

His decisions are not arbitrary. He lays out his logic, rationale, and evidence, but people seemingly are either unaware or uninterested in such, instead preferring to create strawmen to fight against. For instance another post here claims he doesn't "believe" in germ theory. That should immediately be a red flag of something taken out of context or misrepresented, and indeed it was.

Here [1] is a blog which is highly critical of RFK's view on germ theory yet, unlike most media sources, it also lays out what he said in a vaguely reasonable way. He obviously does not reject germ theory in the least, but believes that having an overall healthier lifestyle and avoiding environmental toxins is a more effective means of ensuring your body can fight off infection than by focusing solely on specific germs. The article offers a quote that seems reasonable: "When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response."

Of course one can engage with modern medicine and live a healthy life, but I think his entire schtick is that the whole live a healthy life aspect of healthcare has been largely neglected over the past half century. Just reducing the obesity rate, for instance, would probably have a dramatically greater impact on health outcomes than any new medical discovery over the next 50 years - as we…

One more, a reliable attempt at making sense of sources, started during COVID but now broader:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/

Who am I?

My name is Dr. Katelyn Jetelina. I have a Masters in Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. I am an epidemiologist, data scientist, wife, and mom to two little girls.

During the day I work at a nonpartisan health policy think tank and am a senior scientific consultant to a number of organizations, including the CDC.

At night I write this newsletter. My main goal is to “translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter started in March 2020 to update students, faculty, and staff on the developments of the pandemic. In 36 months, it’s grown to an international audience.

What is this?

The purpose of this newsletter is to provide a direct line of “translated” public health science to the local, national, and international community. Over the past two years, I’ve covered COVID-19 topics ranging from variants, to vaccines and booster roll outs, to exciting new developments like antivirals, and context to some of our greatest unanswered questions.

YLE has also started to dip into other public health topics, like mental health, other infectious diseases, and public health current events (thanks to the feedback from the YLE audience).

My hope is that, together, YLE provides breadth and depth into the pandemic,…

In the U.S. at least:

> There are two states and 618 counties that require circuit breakers (i.e. short-term mitigation measures needed to preserve hospital functioning) at this point because their hospitals are at or above 100% capacity (assuming that the number of staffed beds has not increased in the past week). Medical military personnel have already been dispatched to a number of hospitals across the nation. Nebraska also joined a short list of states that have enacted its Crisis Standards of Care plan. But community-wide efforts to reduce spread desperately need to be taken, too. Fourteen additional states are at high risk of exceeding 100% hospital capacity in the next 1-10 days.

Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-jan-18

That's not wrong, but this time it was scientists who were ringing the bell.

This write-up [1] explains the particular mutations in Omicron in more detail. Basically, Omicron appears to be a perfect storm of various concerning mutations that had appeared in individual strains before - now all assembled into one strain.

Add to that a sudden, unusual spike in infections right where the variant is found and I guess things can start to look scary for a moment.

Of course, it's still guesswork and even though the genome looks scary, the real-world effects may be mild.

[1] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-concerning-variant-b11529

It's worth noting that rapid test results roughly align with contagiousness, which makes them an excellent tool to fight the spread of this thing. [1] (See the 2nd image on this page).

PCR tests will report COVID infections that are way below the threshold of transmissibility, and they'll keep reporting positive results long after the infected person is no longer contagious.

"Am I contagious?" is arguably a more useful question to answer than, "Do I have any detectable amount of COVID in my body, at all, using the best laboratory testing processes available?"

[1] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/antigen-tests-and-omicron

Given the large amount of mutation in this variant, theory point to high likelihood of this being evolved from a single individual with compromised immune system, likely a person in advanced stages of HIV infection.

Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-concerning-variant-b11529

Globally speaking, most of the HIV positives live in sub-saharan Africa, with South Africa having 17.30% of adults carrying HIV, and countries around it in similar ballpark. This points to the variant being evolved in South Africa or its neighbors

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate