Coronavirus, week 109: We're STAT, hear us roar like snowflakes

A good overall piece by STAT, with snooty marketing behind it, caught my eye last week and I didn't get it in last week's roundup of COVID news.

First, the good takeaways, good in terms of information summary, not good morally, of course.

1. COVID was the second-leading cause of death in 2021 in the age 25-44 cohort in the US. It was No. 1 already in the age 45-54 cohort. So, while it primarily killed old people, people younger than 55 have no "safety."

2. Rural people had a higher per-capita death rate than people in metro areas. Probably a mix of factors were involved. On the socio-political side, antimasking and antivaxxing stances were bigger out there. Vaccines arrived later to rural areas, as well. Rural health care is sparse, and what's available is limited.

3. Being "boosted" isn't that much of a benefit. No, really. During the Omicron peak, people who were boosted did have some benefit from being boosted, but not huge, per a graph on site. Plus, there's no indication that the benefit was due to a booster shot itself, or entirely due to a booster shot, versus the idea that people who got booster shots were more conscientious about masking, more likely to have an N95 or KN95 than a plain mask, etc. And, the piece doesn't claim that (to the degree you could control for this in advance, or investigate it as part of the big picture) that this was allowed for.

Now, the snooty marketing.

Author J. Emory Parker's Twitter name? (Not his @.) 

"J Emory Parker [LGBTQ flag icon] Subscribe to STAT+."

I saw his first paragraph, and the start of his second, which said:

Officially, the U.S. will almost certainly reach an awful milestone in the next two weeks: its one millionth recorded Covid-19 death. In reality, this milestone was likely unofficially crossed days or weeks ago, and we’ll never know the exact toll or the identity of the pandemic’s actual millionth victim.

About which I Tweeted to him:

.@jaspar Worldometers, which I trust a lot on COVID data and cite regularly in blogging, said the US crossed 1 million COVID deaths weeks ago, and that was going by official state and territorial health dept stats AFAIK. So, no, we've already crossed that. https://t.co/oBSsxxKYi5

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) May 11, 2022

And he said, on Twitter, in essence:

Would you literally read my second paragraph?

To which I Tweeted back:

Could you please literally read my original reply? I mentioned that Worldometers works off info from state health departments, etc. So, I consider that official.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) May 11, 2022

I can't embed his tweet because? He blocked me. No, really.

So, I screengrabbed that, as shown above, and, because I hadn't blocked him yet, cc-ed him and STAT's Twitter accounts with it.

As for the COVID death reality? I blogged about the 1 million mark nearly two months ago.

AND, Stat, don't expect me to cite you in the future. Certainly, I'll cite nothing by this snowflake.