August 30, 2021

Delta: COVID19 Cases and Deaths for Any Country

Sadly, in August 2021, here I am making an update to this post, which I first added here over a year ago, way back in 2020. Here in the United States, as in several other countries, conservative political leaders have gone almost insane. They have conned so many Americans into walking right into a COVID19 pandemic that is now killing off mostly unvaccinated republican voters in counties with low vaccination rates. 

I am a scientist in North America, who has lived and worked on both sides of the US/Canada border, and as a medical research professor, I felt it my duty to use my blog here to provide more awareness with access to numbers that you can trust. This data visualization lets you follow the progress of COVID19 in the USA and other countries, and visualize it over time. I have included some iFrame code to this blog post to give you the ability to change the time frame and even the selection of countries you may be interested in. You can adjust the graph views to suit your need for knowledge.

Currently, in addition to my eye research, I also manage a small local research study in Oakland County, Michigan, to monitor the presence of antibodies to the COVID19 spike protein in persons. My students and I have found that vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J, do well at producing antibodies in our test volunteers, including ourselves. We are all vaccinated at this point. So keep wearing a mask, get vaccinated, and think about the people who will not get harmed because you buffer them from this pandemic disease.

The "delta" variant is simple and dangerous. 

I can understand why, because I often make proteins and custom modifications to the structure of proteins for medical research. The purpose of my research at Oakland University is to understand how specific proteins work for vision.  I engineer human proteins, which are required to develop structures in our retinas, for bacterial factory production as potential therapeutics to repair damaged human retinas. For conditions such as Retinopathy of Prematurity and Diabetic Retinopathy. In the 90s I briefly got to do some research on how the HIV protease can also harm a cell's proteins in addition to simply processing the making the more HIV virus. Since then we have the knowledge of the human genome. 

So now I can also tell you that viruses generally replicate their own DNA or RNA sequences with low fidelity. That is the DNA or RNA Polymerases that replicate their DNA/RNA tend to make frequent mistakes, to change their genetic code. This, in turn, changes the components that make up the virus's proteins, including the spike protein you hear about on the news. This "spike protein" is used by the virus to bind to cells that line our sinuses and respiratory tract (lungs). This high error copy rate creates hundreds of variations of the COVID19 spike protein in every person who is infected with COVID19. Most of the errors will result in a less infectious virus but once in while, versions like the delta variant evolve to spread faster and more efficiently. This is the case now in 2021, August. So I am updating and reposting this blog, as we all need to watch how numbers rise again. Numbers of cases and numbers of deaths. As 99.9% of persons entering ICU and 99.9% of those dying from Delta variant in the ICU are unvaccinated, I suggest you get vaccinated ASAP. 

Here are graphs that you can adjust to look at different timelines for cases of illness and deaths for any country. I embedded iFrame code in this posting to give you graphs that you can also adjust. Table and MAP views are also available. Book mark this blog posting so you can return here. The data in these graphs will update automatically.