comparing covid maps of the US

if vaccines stop covid spread, then why is all the covid spread in the highest vaxxed counties? and why are serve cases rising most in the most vaccinated?

this is a county by county map of vaccination rate published HERE by the new york times.

it’s in percentages, green is high, and dark green highest.

as can be readily seen there are several zones of very high vaccination rates:

1. the coastal west

2. the northeast

3. florida, especially south florida around miami (but less so in west and panhandle)

4. the upper midwest around northern illinois, WI, MN, iowa

5. puerto rico and alaska

6. the lower half of 4 corners in AZ, NM

7. the southern edge of texas

there is also a wide diagonal band of low vaccination stretching from georgia/alamaba northwest to montana and idaho.

(data seems to be missing for VT. it’s one of the highest vaxx states in the US)

now, if vaccination were working to stop covid spread, you’d expect to see these areas manifest lower infection rates.

this is doubly true right now, especially in the northern latitudes where covid seasonality would be predicted to have ended infections for the summer.

(florida, texas etc tend to get a summer surge, but have it’s still a bit early for it)

but instead, we see this:

the hotspots map (measured in cases per 100k people, so population density is already accounted for) looks almost exactly like the vaccination map.

this overlap is far too striking to ignore.

of the 7 zones i mentioned above, 5, arguable 6 are hotspots.

the northeast has been a hotspot for months. the norther midwest has now joined them, out of season, on exactly the minn, wis, northern illinois arc that is highly vaccinated and stopping right in mid illinois where the vaxx rate changes, esp in the south east corner.

west coast, same.

florida is especially telling as the hotspots are all east coast and focused in miami, right where all the vaccination is. this is awfully precise to simply ignore:

the only 2 places with high vaxx NOT following this pattern are 4 corners and the southern TX border and 4 corners is arguable as it does have a high rate, just not quite dark red yet. (let’s give it a minute and see what happens) perhaps it’s climate or population density or just lag. these areas should not be in seasonal expression now and don’t get the constant travelers from the northeast that florida gets so that may have effect as well.

and this issue is not confined to cases. as i have discussed several times before, hospitalization is spiking all across the NE in the over 70’s age group who is nearly 100% vaccinated (over 95% everyplace) and highly boosted as well.

this would be the OAS canary in the coal mine as this group has the least effective generalized immune response, relies most on specific antibodies, and therefore would manifest such an issue most clearly and earliest.

this makes it quite worrying that every single state in the NE is in a significant uptrend during what should be the tail end of the seasonal downtrend toward nearly no covid for summer.

this is a jarring outcome that is in no way consistent with vaccine working, especially after such cohort depletion, build up of natural immunity, and an overall milder variant in omicron.

and it’s focused on the oldest and most vaxxed. these rises are not the same in younger groups.

even new hampshire, who changed their definition of hospitalization so dramatically, is now back in surge.

this:

bought them a temporary reprieve in reported hospitalization, but the sharp increases have returned and this would seem to indicate that the current rise is all serious patients being treated for covid with covid specific drugs.

comparing current hospital admissions in over 70’s to a year ago is stark. they are rising in a time of year they would be predicted to fall and their absolute levels are vastly above last year.

the best performers are still up 70-80% vs a year ago. many are at or over triple the counts.

perhaps most worrying, many of the worst performers (RI, MA, NY) were states already very hard hit by covid.

this speaks to significant failure to generate natural immunity and this issue so far looks isolated to the higher vaxxed regions

and that should worry people.

(i’d love to see a map of booster rates is anyone has one. that could be very telling.)

every week that this keeps going on is more and more damaging to the vaccine case and increasingly supportive of the theory that the vaccines have caused antigenic fixation, lead to hoskins effect/OAS variants, and that the vaccinated are now preyed upon by a virus that inevitably evolved to take advantage of herd level antigenic fixation caused by leaky vaccines with narrow immuno-training vectors.

and herd level antigenic fixation is very, very bad.

homogenizing herd level antigenic fixation

all the research about inability to ever generate N antibodies post vaccination and thus generate sterilizing immunity is looking similarly relevant.

variant specific boosters fail to elicit variant specific response

and this issue is spreading. oregon and california are starting to show similar patterns to the northeast. (washington is rising but has had idiosyncratic seasonal patterns in the past and i’m not sure why it varies so much from others)

so too is florida, though their seasonal pattern is also more complex and their numbers are not really up yoy yet. that said, their current rise in over 70’s looks worrying and data everyone ignores in the northeast always seems to kick up national firestorms and blame fests when it happens on desantis’s watch, so perhaps brace for it.

i keep saying i am really hoping to be wrong about this, but the evidence is really piling up and it looks more and more inescapable to conclude that the covid vaccines have broken herd immunity formation both for spread and increasingly for severity. the CDC data on this is so definitionally rigged and slanted by using inaccurate denominators as to render it unfit to draw clinical conclusions from and the society level data is increasing revealing this.

and so we land here: right where nobody wanted to but that so many warned we would.