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.
You are welcome to share this.
--
From the weekend circuit. Dr. Scott Gottlieb: "We thought we'd be coming down by now we'd see deaths peak and start to come down as the Epidemics in the southern states started to peak and decline. But there's been a fairly persistent level of infection, hospitalizations and deaths over the last couple of weeks, we've had over 1000 deaths a day for at least two weeks now over 50,000 infections a day on average, we hit 55,000. In the last day, hospitalizations have come down a little bit but they haven't really started to decline very rapidly. What's happening is As the case is starting to decline in the southern states, Arizona, Texas, Florida, we're starting to see infections pick up in other parts of the country, California is still increasing. Really the only state that seems to have come down quite a bit of the epidemic. sunbelt states is Arizona. And we now have 14 states with positivity rates above 10%, Mississippi at 21%. Nevada 17%, Florida 18%. So there's still a lot of states with pretty high positivity rates.
And so this was the first study where they could say with certainty that for at least three months, you have immunity that would guard against reinfection actually said people have been exposed to covid, who've had infection the last three months don't need to self quarantine because the immunity is that absolute. That doesn't mean you're not going to have immunity for a longer period of time. The study just looked at three months. COVID hasn't been around long enough for us to really study long term immunity in a practical way and people in the community, but it's probably the case that you're going to have a period of immunity that class anywhere from six to 12 months, it's going to be highly variable. Some people will have less immunity. Some people have slightly more, but it's good news that they're able to document that people have really sterile immunity, they're not going to get reinfected for at least three months and probably longer than that after infection.
Probably a long way from herd immunity if you look at the seroprevalence He's overall maybe 8% of the population as a whole has been exposed to us. In outbreak states like Arizona might be higher closer to 25% based on some modeling, maybe as high as 20% in Florida based on certain modeling and 15%. In Texas, we know the seroprevalence in New York cities 20%. So that's getting closer to a level of immunity that with a rate of transmission will start to decline. It's not quite herd immunity, but you're going to see declines in the rate of transmission because of that, that level of infection. There's also speculation around T cell immunity whether or not people who have prior infection with coronavirus have some residual T cell memory that confers immunity. We don't know if the T cells confirm immunity, but we do know now that people who had prior infection with coronaviruses other coronaviruses have what we call cross reactive T cells. So they have T cells that cross react with this particular coronavirus. "
Source:
Commentary: We are seeing very high positivity rates on testing around the United States. That's a strong indicator we are not testing nearly enough. A decrease in cases means nothing if you've stopped testing enough - only when you test very broadly can you see how good or bad things are.
--
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot: "Well, interestingly, we didn't see that rise when we saw a lot of mass gatherings in late May, early June. But yes, of course, we're concerned. If you look across the country, virtually every state has been blowing up with new COVID cases. And while number those states, we're seeing a slight decline in the cases, they're still at such a high level, that that's a problem. And as people travel from one jurisdiction to the next, then that presents challenges for other jurisdictions. Chicago has seen a steady increase in cases that's being driven by our 18 to 29 year old cohort, we've just got a break through the young people that they are not immune to this virus. And we're continuing to see an increase in the Latinx community, which we are actively engage with our partners on the ground there to do more work, more intervention to bring those case rates down.
Thinking about the schools is a complex problem. One, it's not just the students themselves. It's the entire ecosystem of a school. So you've got teachers, you've got principals, and you've got staff. We're looking at Chicago, we have a number of teachers and support staff, or over 60. We know that those are still vulnerable population. We have a number of people that work in the school system, who have underlying medical conditions, comorbidity is still a real issue. So thinking about the schools is a very complicated endeavor. And we want to make sure that we provide the safest environment for our young people to learn. Now we've decided we're going all remote. We have offered a program To connect 100,000 houses for free with Wi Fi and broadband because we know that that's critically important to enhance the learning environment for our young people.
Look, we're never going to get everything that we need from the federal government. If we waited for them, we'd be in dire straits. It would be great. If there was not the chaos that we've seen at the federal government, the White House fighting the CDC, the HHS hijacking of the reporting process, and still we don't have a consistent testing regime, we still don't have a federal mass policy. The Chaos at the federal level has not been helpful to anyone, not Chicago, Illinois, not states across the country."
Source:
Commentary: The gold standard that the infectious disease community recommends is a positivity rate for testing under 5%, sustained for 14 days. Very few communities are accomplishing this.
--
Dr. Eric Ding: "How one university is claiming to keep students and professors safe: “just stay behind the blue tape on the floor”.
➡️ 6 feet rule indoors is inadequate. Public health theater is not useful.
➡️ We need to communicate and emphasize aerosol risks. #COVID19"
Source:
Commentary: The image, if it's not visible, is a piece of tape across the front of a classroom.
Think about COVID-19 like you think about smoking. How effective is a "non-smoking" section in a restaurant or an airplane? It's not. Treat COVID-19 like smoking - if you wouldn't allow smoking in a space because there's no effective way to separate the air from the non-smoking section, then don't allow people in an airspace you want COVID-19-free. In the case of schools, if you couldn't realistically keep a classroom smoke-free if one student was smoking, then you shouldn't be having class in that classroom. Got enough ventilation and strong masks for everyone that someone could light up in that room and no one else would smell it? Then you're ready for people to be in that room.
--
On a lighter note, an inventor creates a mask shooting gun to fling masks at maskless people.
Source:
Commentary: Technically, flinging anything at anyone without their consent is legally assault, so don't try this at home, but it is a funny bit of humor.
--
A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason. Consider also spraying the bottoms of your shoes with a general disinfectant (alcohol/bleach/peroxide) when you return home. Remember that cleaners are never to be ingested or injected.
2. Wear a mask when out of your home and if going to a high risk area, wear goggles. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too.
3. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters. Avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
4. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
5. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
--
Common misinformation debunked!
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
--
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.