The Latest COVID Science, And What The Numbers Mean For NYC

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and there was good news and bad news about COVID-19 in our area today. The good news, the case positivity rate in New York state dropped below 3% this weekend for the first time, since November. The status 2.99% statewide, according to Governor Cuomo, that's consistent with a big drop in new cases nationally.

Some of the bad news is that glaring disparities continue to persist. Manhattan's positivity rate as of two days ago is 2.2%. In the Bronx it was 5.9%, according to the COVID statistics page on Gothamist. We saw the first confirmed case of the so-called South Africa variant of the virus in Metro New York this weekend. It was on Long Island in Glen Head on the North shore. As Congressman Suozzi just said, that variant is not only believed to be more contagious, it appears to be more resistant to the currently available vaccines. There is new uncertainty about the near future in COVID terms, in our area.

Joining us now WNYC health and science editor Nsikan Akpan and Jake Dobkin publisher of Gothamist and author of the book Ask a Native New Yorker. Good morning, Nsikan, good morning, Jake.

Nsikan Akpan: Hey Brian.

Jake Dobkin: Hey, how's it going?

Brian Lehrer: For those of you who don't know Nsikan yet, he started as health and science editor last month and we are lucky to have him with his having been science editor for national geographic and before that creator of the science scope series that many of you saw in the PBS NewsHour, where he and his team won an Emmy Award last year for their COVID coverage and a Peabody award in 2019 for the PBS NewsHour series, The Plastic Problem. I should probably call him Dr. Akpan because he's got a PhD in pathobiology, which I don't even know what that means. Nsikan, a belated welcome to WNYC as well as to the show.

Nsikan Akpan: Many thanks. I'm very much blushing right now. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Can you take us right into the science of this variant B1351, sometimes known as the variant from South Africa, but now maybe we should call it the variant from Long Island as a case has been found in Nassau County. I see on Gothamist that a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found the Pfizer vaccine was two-thirds, less effective than against the original COVID-19. Another study also found the Moderna vaccine was less effective in a laboratory experiment. Can you explain what less effective means in this case? What were they actually measuring?

Nsikan Akpan: Yes, of course. I think while we've been very much focused on the variant from the UK, because it arose first and because it's so highly transmissible and it also was really overwhelming hospitals over there. I think the one that is really concerning scientists the most is the variant from South Africa. The one that you just mentioned.

That's because it it's very much similar to the UK variant, but has these additional mutations that seem to allow it to somewhat or partially bypass our immunity, whether it's immunity after a regular infection or with some of our vaccines. That's obviously very problematic because we just got these vaccines. We just spent a year really pumping in tons and tons of money to develop them. The idea that we might have this variant emerge right as we're starting to get them out and as we're starting to make some progress against the outbreak, it could be really, really troubling.

The one note, a lot of the evidence that we have so far showing that the South African variant can get past our immunity involves what we call pseudo viruses. They're not exactly the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They're like a laboratory-based mimic that it's a little bit safer to handle than the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus. There's that caveat with the data. Although some research has shown that these mimics can actually do a pretty good job in terms of being able to test for whether or not a vaccine can protect against infection.

Brian Lehrer: That is potentially disturbing if we're all getting vaccinated eventually against things that may not be the complete picture. Is it possible to say what the prospects are then for a booster shot that would add protection against the variant? Even though I know people are rolling their eyes, even at that question like, "I'm going to have to go back again if I've got it already," or if that's even the right thing to be looking for.

Nsikan Akpan: Yes, the thing to point out right now is that the evidence suggests that all of our vaccines should be able to neutralize all of the variants to some degree. It might just be that we have to go back, like you say, for a booster more often than we would have before. I think that situation is similar to what we see with influenza and vaccination for influenza every year but obviously COVID is a much more dangerous disease. Even if we are required to get a booster down the line, I hope people have enough motivation to go do it, even if it's interrupting their daily schedule.

Brian Lehrer: All right, Jake Dopkin, you're the data guy in this conversation. Nsikan is the science guy. Give us a little overview of the last few months rollercoaster in the city. Did we have what we can now definitely call a Thanksgiving increase in spike and how far back down have we come as of the last few days it's looking like pretty good news.

Jake Dobkin: Yes, let me just set the stage, like in positive cases the first peak in early April saw the city detecting about 5,000 cases a day, and then that fell to below 500 in June and then stayed low until September when we began to see those signs of the second wave. That escalated pretty quickly until the cases peaked out around 6,300 per day. That was actually on January 9th and they've been falling since then. Now the seven-day average is around 3,600, which is still obviously pretty high.

In deaths, it showed actually a pretty different pattern. We had that huge spike in April and May, which peaked at 800 per day and then fell to almost zero from July to October, but during the second wave deaths haven't gone above 100 per day in the city. Of course, it's still a huge tragedy, but it's a lot less than the peak during the first wave. It's possible that the intensity of the first wave just hit the most vulnerable New Yorkers and there are simply fewer of them left to be infected during the second wave or that our medical care has gotten better or both.

Now your question about, is it clear what happened over Thanksgiving and the holidays? I'm looking at the last three months, and I'm not seeing a huge spike after Thanksgiving or after people had their holiday celebrations. We've seen pretty steady decline in cases, in positivity rate and new hospitalizations over the last few weeks. It's possible that as a city, we had just achieved enough immunity in the right groups of people that we were somewhat protected against like a huge spike after Thanksgiving and Christmas, which we didn't see.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. The governor announced the good news over the weekend of a one-day positivity rate statewide of 2.99%, as I mentioned in the intro. Under 3%, but that's just a one-day snapshot so we'll have to see if it persists. If I read one of your data points correctly on Gothamist, it was 2.2% positivity in Manhattan, 5.9% in the Bronx. The disparities in infection rates are ongoing at that glaring level?

Jake Dobkin: Yes, we're still seeing, if you want to talk about positivity, Manhattan, having a much lower positivity rate than the Bronx, which is our highest borough almost looks like about three times as high positivity as Manhattan with the rest of the boroughs, Queens, then Staten Island, then Brooklyn have lower positivity rates. We're still seeing these glaring disparities in the spread of the infection as well as in hospitalizations and in deaths.

Brian Lehrer: Can either of you say, if policy makers have not been trying hard enough to reduce these disparities, or if the underlying social determinants are just more powerful than their efforts, because if they're not doing everything they can even now, journalists like us and activists should be pushing that fact so hard. Jake?

Jake Dobkin: It seems clear to me because I can look at the maps from the entire epidemic from March until now and compare them with the maps for the last week. The maps look pretty similar, which tells me that the pattern has remained the same. It hasn't changed so vastly that we're seeing the poor more diverse neighborhoods doing much better than they were doing. We're still seeing this pattern where you look at the map and it's this glaring the richer areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens doing better than the poor and more diverse areas.

It is possible that, as you said, the underlying conditions, things like crowded housing, poor people working jobs that generate more exposure or just worse underlying health challenges in poor neighborhoods are just such strong drivers that they're outweighing our public health efforts. Or it's possible that we just haven't done enough yet and despite what the city government is saying about their goals, they just haven't achieved them yet.

Brian Lehrer: Nsikan, anything on this?

Nsikan Akpan: Yes, I think I would love to see a little bit more from the city and state in terms of data around the vaccine rollout. I think the mayor and the city's health department have repeatedly said that some of the disparities that we're seeing in recipients of the vaccine can be blamed on hesitancy. Black and Latino residents have received half of the share expected for them based on the city's population makeup. Whereas if you look at white residents, they're a third of the city, but they account for nearly half of the known vaccine takers.

I think to really get at this question, and this was part of a story that we put out last week and also a question that we posed to the mayor last Thursday. We need to know how many doses are going to the dozens of vaccine sites around the city. If they're sending more supply to Manhattan and Queens or Bronx and Brooklyn, then the city can't fully blame hesitancy for the disparities.

There's some national surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation that are seeing, yes, Black and Latinos are saying, "Oh, we're just going to wait and see, we want to make sure that these vaccines are completely safe," and they are based out of all the data we have so far, but a lot of those surveys also show that people aren't getting vaccinated because they don't know when they're going to get vaccinated. When they're going to be up in line, they don't know where exactly to go to get the vaccine.

We really need, I think, the city to put out this data and to the mayor's credit, last week he said that he is going to release the supply data for vaccine sites though he didn't give a timeline. I'm really eager to see it.

Brian Lehrer: Take me one step deeper into that if you can, because we know that the city has finally released vaccination data by zip code. It revealed some of the disparities that everybody knows. Yet, as you said, your article on Gothamist the other day was about Mayor de Blasio promising to release vaccination data by vaccination sites. If we have the zip code data, what do we learn by looking at the actual sites?

I guess that means as specific as to take in upper Manhattan example, there's been much in the news. How many doses are being administered at the Washington Heights Armory versus the local Rite Aid? What are you looking for there that would be different than zip code?

Nsikan Akpan: Right. If you say that one group has taken less of a vaccine than another, that could be for a few different reasons. It could be that the first group just went out, it was more excited, more eager to go get the vaccine than the second, or it could be that the first group had just more access. There are more sites, there are more sites with more doses, and that could explain the disparity. I think in order to really know the answer of where people are being hesitant, where people are reluctant to go and get the vaccine, we really need to know what the supply looks like across the city.

Is the supply actually equal. Then that will help us really pinpoint, who is saying, "Oh, I see that I have the opportunity to go get this vaccine in my neighborhood and I'm just not going to do it." Then we can better target strategies for those areas to convince them because we do need people to take these vaccines if we want to reach herd immunity, if we want to have community level of protection against this virus. I think we can do it.

If you look at measles, measles is much more contagious than the Coronavirus and we have a vaccine against the measles that protects, 80%, 90% of people. We have vaccines here that protect 80%, 90% of people against the coronavirus. We need people to take them. I think herd immunity is a goal that we can achieve over time.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with WNYC health and science editor Nsikan Akpan nd Jake Dobkin from Gothamist 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue to talk about good news and bad news and the COVID data from our area with WNYC health and science editor, Nsikan Akpan and Jake Dobkin from Gothamist who keeps the Gothamist COVID tracker which many of you have been following for almost a year now and Matt in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi Matt.

Matt: Hey, Brian, it's an honor to be on the show. Thanks for taking my call. I had a question because I'm on nyc.gov website right now. I'm tracking the positivity rate and it looks like the positivity rate for New York city is well above 7% on their site. I guess I'm just confused by where we should be looking for sources. It looks like this doesn't include antigen tests, so is positivity just way lower for antigen tests and like, I guess what some literacy for understanding this positivity rate?

Jake Dobkin: I can take that question. It's really important to separate out where the statistics come from. The city and state have different versions of this statistics, where they draw from different sources and include different kinds of tests. For instance, as you said, the antigen test, the antibody tests would tend to have lower positivity rates and draw down the average.

For instance right now in New York City the seven day positivity average is 7.59%. A lot higher than what the state is reporting. Now also, of course, the state includes all of these upstate areas, some of which have very low positivity rates and so that will also draw down their average. I think that for all of us living in the city, going by the New York city department of health stats is probably the way to go because they're really the experts on what's happening in the city and that's really the data that I follow most closely.

Brian Lehrer: The seven day positivity rate, of Governor Cuomo, who of course is under pressure for his nursing home scandal wanted to deliver some good news over the weekend. He said 2.99% so under 3% statewide positivity rate for the first time since November, but that was one day. Sometimes a weekend number is artificially low because not as many people are going out and getting tested or maybe the reporting staffs aren't as robust on the weekend. Put that into context a little bit.

Jake Dobkin: Yes. That's such a good point. That's why on our tracker we use seven day averages for pretty much every stat. Often we'll show that the day to day fluctuation, which looks like a very spiky line going up and down, especially on the weekends for a lot of these stats they really just dropped. If you picked, like a Saturday or a Sunday for a given stat, you could really pick a low number.

The seven day average is less likely, less able to be manipulated because it always includes a couple of days of weekend. That's really what I focus on. Those trends, to be fair for the city, as reported by the New York City department of health, those trends are moving in the right direction. They're just not as dramatically lower as the governor's reporting.

Brian Lehrer: Are the numbers, people have a right to be confused at the moment. Nsikan, can you hypothesize about why cases seem to be on a steep decline nationally, just as we're hearing so much about the arrival of the new more contagious variant. The UK variant so-called has been circulating in the US for weeks, but new case rates are still seriously dropping all over the country. Are the variants being contained better than people predicted, or is this the calm before the exponential storm like last year at this time when it was still news?

Remember when it was news that there was a case of Coronavirus in New Rochelle? Oh my God, there's a case in New Rochelle, and then before we knew it, boom, it was everywhere and nobody was talking about individual cases again. Now we have this case of the so-called South Africa variant, one case in Nassau County, and we're all talking about it and yet cases are going down nationwide. How does this make sense?

Nsikan Akpan: Yes, it does feel like Déjà vu, but also we're seeing so many signs of progress. I was chatting with an epidemiologist on Twitter about this over the weekend. We were DM-ing back and forth. I think in terms of the case decline, we've been doing this for almost a year and I think people are just tired of the pandemic. I think that people are more likely to take social distancing and mask wearing seriously and we're starting to see that in the data. I think nationwide we're approaching 500,000 deaths, almost 30,000 New York City resident deaths.

I think people are just ready to have their lives back right in like when the solutions are as simple as putting on a mask or just keeping just a little bit further away from people. I think we're ready and looking at the data. A group at the university of Washington, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, I'm sure people have heard of them. They're abbreviated IHME, they've been tracking self-reported mask use data for all 50 states and we do see an increase starting towards the end of last year, like as the second or third serge was starting to take hold across the nation.

I just think you're seeing more compliance with some of these public health practices. With the variants it's too soon to tell. We only have, I want to say just over a thousand cases of the variants here in the United States. We need to see if the situation is going to play out like it did in the UK and it's going to sweep through and cause another wave or another surge, or if people are distancing, if they're wearing their masks, if they're being good about public health maybe you don't see that surge. Maybe we do actually stamp out the virus going into the spring and going into the summer.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hope. Robin on the lower East side, you're on WNYC. Hi Robin.

Robin: Hi. thank you for taking my call. I have a question that I don't know if anyone's addressed yet. I'm thinking about undocumented immigrants and the process of them going online and signing up and showing up to one of these vaccination sites and how they might be afraid to do that and feel vulnerable and if there's any reassurance or answer to that question and that that might be affecting, who's signing up for the vaccine and the numbers of who's showing up

Brian Lehrer: Jake, any data on that.

Jake Dobkin: I know the city has offered assurances that immigration status is not something that's going to be asked for or play into it. If you do look at the map of where vaccinations are and are not taking place, we are seeing lower vaccination rates, for instance, around Corona, in Queens, some of the neighborhoods in Eastern Brooklyn where there's a lot of undocumented immigrants.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor and I do think the city needs to do a better job reaching out to this community is through the media that they listen to and then just by going into the neighborhoods and offering that assurance because we really need everyone, as Nsikan said, to reach herd immunity.

Brian Lehrer: Jane in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi Jane.

Jane: Hi, I live in one 10471 and I've contacted assemblyman Dinowitz, a lot of people. I've tried to contact the head of the healthcare committees, city council, Mark Levine, 10471, Dinowitz says Cuomo will not put up a new pop-up site. Dinowitz has offered Riverdale [unintelligible 00:23:58], they've offered college in Mount St. Vincent, but they just refuse to put it in there. My position is if you want herd immunity, you have to include everybody in the herd.

I feel like when I have friends who are seniors, I have friends who have adult developmentally disabled kids. I have friends who are teachers. I have friends with co-morbidities under the ages under 65, cannot get an appointment, but people who go to other neighborhoods, then they get shamed for going to other neighborhoods. They should put it in every zip code.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Do either of you know how they're figuring out where to put the pop-ups. Jake, go ahead.

Jake Dobkin: Yes. I can give some data on 10471 which is in the Northwestern Bronx. It actually has a higher vaccination rates so far than some of the other neighborhoods in the Bronx, especially in the South and Central Bronx. That just means that people who live in that zip code have been able to find vaccinations by going outside. Of course, yes. Every zip code really needs a vaccination site because some people, especially older people, people with disabilities may not be able to make it a mile or two away.

Brian Lehrer: We're almost out of time with Jake Dobkin from Gothamist and our health and science editor Nsikan Akpan. Nsikan, before you go, can I take advantage of the fact that you're not just a health editor, but our health and science editor and ask you briefly about the Mars landing last week? I see from the Gothamist article on this, even landing a spacecraft on Mars is difficult because of the thin atmosphere and many attempts have failed. What does thin atmosphere mean and why is it relevant to landing something on the surface?

Nsikan Akpan: First, it's a feat. It's great to be going back to Mars and to be trying to study such an important question, was there ancient life there. Landing on Mars is extremely difficult because the atmosphere is much, much thinner than our own. If you were, imagine that the- Would be a bad analogy. Imagine that the Earth's atmosphere was like swimming in the ocean. How you just move around very slowly when you're in the ocean.

The Martian atmosphere would be similar to standing on the surface of our planet. Like it would just be much, much easier for you to move around. You have way less resistance. They have these dust storms that lasts forever just because the atmosphere is so thin. Just four years ago, Europe attempted to land a Mars Lander and it crashed. Just getting onto the surface of Mars can be really, really tricky. I think that's why you saw those huge celebrations last week when perseverance landed.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I see that a lead scientist in this powerful camera, they sent up their development of that is Vishnu Sridhar from Queens. Can you explain just briefly, and then we're out of time, what's special about this camera and what scientists hope to learn about Mars from this mission that non-Martians like I should care about.

Nsikan Akpan: Yes. The super cam as it's called. It's a bit of a misnomer because it isn't really taking photographs. What it's doing is it's scanning around a different light frequencies to analyze the chemical composition of what's around it. What's exciting about it is that it can scan things like rocks and minerals from 20 feet away. The Rover doesn't actually have to physically go over there and scoop something up. It can just scan it from a distance.

The super cam, people are thinking is going to be part of the key to determining whether or not there's ancient life on Mars. It's going to be looking for organic matter and other chemical signs of that.

Brian Lehrer: Nsikan Akpan, the new science and health editor for WNYC health and science editor and Jake Dobkin, publisher and keeper of the COVID tracker on Gothamist. Thank you both so much for explaining so much stuff this half hour. Thanks a lot.

Jake Dobkin: Thanks, Brain.

Nsikan Akpan: Thanks, Brian.

 

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