Thursday, January 05, 2023

Today's News: Update on Covid


I haven't posted much about the Covid news lately, but I have been gathering together some of the articles and tweets that seem to summarize the most helpful advice right now.
TL,DR: wear a mask, damn it!

Above is a New York Times chart that summarizes the differences between common colds, the flu, Covid, and the newest problem disease, Respiratory Syncytial Virus - I thought people might find it useful.
This was a startling tweet to read last month:
At The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk has written a brilliant summary article Ten Covid Facts Health Officials Dangerously Downplay:
...1. COVID is airborne and travels like smoke....
2. COVID is a disease of the vascular system....
3. COVID alters and ages brain function for up to two years after an infection....
4. Having COVID is associated with a 66 per cent higher risk of developing new onset diabetes....
5. COVID damages the heart and can cause sudden strokes in young people....
6. Each and every COVID infection exerts a toll on your health....
7. Immune dysfunctions can persist for up to eight months and possibly longer after a COVID infection....
8. Women are at greatest risk for long COVID....
9. Vaccines alone won’t deliver us....
10. We are all in this together. There is only one way out of our COVID mess. It is not denial. And it is not passivity.
It is masking, testing, social distancing and clean air engineering via ventilation and filtration.
She lists a number of issues - public health lessons learned, positive and negative vaccine impacts, damage to public support for science, stress on health care workers, and so forth - but I think the most significant is how the Covid virus itself continues to evolve:
...Many of the people STAT interviewed cited SARS-CoV-2’s evolution as their biggest surprise of the pandemic. “It’s been wild, in my view,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Anthony Fauci, retiring head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also listed it as his number 1 surprise. “What has surprised me most about Covid is the continual evolution of new variants leading to an unprecedented persistence of the pandemic phase over three years,” he said.
Michael Diamond, a viral immunologist at Washington University, scoffed when he recalled the early proclamations about the virus’ inability to mutate much. “At some point we’re going to run out of mutational space. Well, we haven’t run out of that yet, which was surprising to us, I think, that the virus is still flexible enough to be able to accommodate these mutations. And not only do that, but increase transmissibility and increase immune escape concurrently.”
The erroneous prediction was predicated on what, after the fact, was clearly a flawed idea — that the evolutionary rate seen when a virus was moving through a totally naïve population would remain the evolutionary rate when the virus faced the challenge of infecting people who had some vaccine- or infection-acquired immunity, said Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University.
Bieniasz was surprised by the role immunocompromised people — people who, once they contracted Covid, could not shake the infection for weeks, sometimes months — played in driving evolution of the virus. That phenomenon is believed to be responsible for another of the surprises about SARS-2 evolution. Most viruses evolve in a stepwise fashion known as “drift,” adding change after change to an existing strain. But some of the Covid variants look more like old versions of the virus were hyper mutated, possibly in a persistently infected person. When those viruses started to spread, they replaced the viruses that had been circulating. The Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Omicron variants of concern are examples of this type of evolution, called saltation, Thomas Peacock and colleagues wrote in a preprint article posted in late November.
“The reality is that SARS-CoV-2 had a much greater capacity for adaptation than I expected,” said Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “While this fact was exacerbated by slow uptake and delivery of vaccines, the truth is that the sheer amount of virus and replication provide enough replication cycles to … select for mutations that provided fitness and immune evasion advantages.”
Here is a chilling thread: And finally, there's always a comedian, isn't there (thank heavens!)
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1 comment:

e.a.f. said...

read through the list of symptoms and thought what had caused some of them was the result of watching the americans in house of representatives vote for mccarthy. O.K. I'm just sick with either of the 3 diseases, I'll get over that. don't know if we will get over the new configurations in the house in the U.S.A.

Thank you for the chart. It does put all the information in one spot so we can compare. Had my shots and boosters and flu shot, and haven't stopped wearing a mask. I do hope to make it through all of this so I can see how it ends in the U.S.A.

3:01 am

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