Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
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My arm feels better today, 2 days after the Moderna first shot. Yesterday it felt like I'd worked out too hard on one shoulder. Today it feels like someone lightly punched me in the shoulder.
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J&J vaccine also has extremely rare side effects. "Six people, out of over 6 million who have received the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID vaccine, have developed a rare type of blood clot. As a result, the FDA and CDC have announced a pause in the use of this vaccine. The pause is likely to last just a few days.
The reason for the pause, spokespeople for the FDA and CDC said, is to allow time to get the word out to healthcare providers across the country to look out for this rare complication, and to allow the CDC’s advisory committee on vaccination practices to review the evidence and decide whether to change their recommendations about who should get the vaccine."
Source: https://vitals.lifehacker.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-j-j-vaccine-blood-clot-1846672700
Commentary: The odds of a serious complication are roughly - and literally - one in a million. Once the FDA and CDC have evaluated it, and re-authorized it, it will still be safe, and substantially better than no vaccine at all. To put in context, you have about the same odds of winning more than $50,000 in the Powerball lottery as you do an adverse reaction to the J&J vaccine.
Why stop, then? Because most people are bad at statistics and confidence in vaccines is paramount to getting as many people vaccinated as possible. In acting out of an abundance of caution, it reduces the arguments that anti-vaccine folks can make about the vaccines.
Real talk: you could give a glass of water to a million people and someone's going to have an adverse reaction. And your odds of being injured or killed getting to the vaccination are about 1,000 times higher. But good for the FDA and CDC to keep doing the things that maintain confidence in the vaccines.
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Why isn't the federal government surging vaccines to Michigan? It's too late. "The Biden administration and Michigan’s Democratic governor are locked in an increasingly tense standoff over the state’s worst-in-the-nation coronavirus outbreak, with a top federal health official on Monday urging the governor to lock down her state.
As the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, publicly called again for a surge of vaccine supply, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at a White House news conference that securing extra doses was not the most immediate or practical solution to the outbreak. She said that Michigan — whose metro areas include 16 of the 17 worst outbreaks in the nation — needed to enact shutdown measures to stamp out the crush of infections.
“The answer is not necessarily to give vaccine,” said the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down.”
But other public health experts have said that because it takes weeks for full protection from vaccines to kick in, the effects of sending extra doses to the state would take too long to see.
“I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we would be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work, to actually have the impact,” Dr. Walensky said, adding, “If we vaccinate today, we will have, you know, impact in six weeks, and we don’t know where the next place is going to be that is going to surge.”
Dr. Tom Frieden, a former C.D.C. director, said wearing masks indoors and avoiding indoor events were more immediate remedies."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/us/politics/michigan-coronavirus-whitmer-biden.html
Commentary: It takes 6-8 weeks for the vaccines to take full effect in a population for mRNA vaccines, and 2-3 weeks for the J&J single shot, once it's reauthorized for use. Michigan can't wait that long in a surge - no state can. The answer, which the local politicians are unwilling to consider, is to go into lockdown. Lockdowns work immediately by closing down transmission opportunities - as long as citizens comply.
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COVID-19 has created 20% more single-parent children and orphans. "Our model suggests that each COVID-19 death leaves 0.078 children aged 0 to 17 parentally bereaved. This represents a 17.5% to 20.2% increase in parental bereavement absent COVID-19. Although the bereavement multiplier is small, it translates into large numbers of children who have lost a parent. As of February 2021, 37 300 children aged 0 to 17 years had lost at least 1 parent due to COVID-19, three-quarters of whom were adolescents (Table). Of these, 20 600 were non-Hispanic White children and 7600 were non-Hispanic Black children. When we rely on excess deaths, we estimate that 43 000 children have lost a parent. A natural herd immunity strategy that results in 1.5 million deaths4 demonstrates the potential effect of inaction: 116 900 parentally bereaved children."
Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2778229
Commentary: The challenge now is that children are spreading COVID-19 thanks to schools reopening too soon, no vaccines authorized for kids, and poor ventilation in schools. That's a deadly combination, because the kids bring it home.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Always wear the best mask available to you when out of your home and you'll be around other people. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too. Wear an N95/FFP2/KN95 that's NIOSH-approved or better mask if you can obtain it. If you can't get an N95 mask, wear a surgical mask with a cloth mask over it.
2. Get vaccinated as soon as you're able to, and fulfill the full vaccine regimen.
3. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason.
4. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters, preferably more. Avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
5. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
6. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
7. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit, except when you share close airspaces with other residences (like a window less than a meter away from a neighboring window).
8. Masks must fit properly to work. Here's how to properly fit a mask:
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no mercury or other heavy metals in the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/09/1013538/what-are-the-ingredients-of-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.