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.
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Gen Z playing a risky game. "Spring Break crowds may be an indication Generation Z isn’t waiting for a vaccination to resume pre-pandemic routines.
But a new NBCLX/Morning Consult poll reveals a growing number of young adults may never get vaccinated.
The March 2021 poll found Gen Z and Millennial adults between 18 and 34 are now the most likely generations to say they will either not get vaccinated (23%) or they don’t yet know (21%), with Gen Z adults (18-23 years old) particularly disinterested.
That represents a steep increase in vaccine hesitancy from March 2020, when NBCLX and Morning Consult first polled about a possible coronavirus vaccine, during the most restrictive pandemic shutdowns. At that time, only 5% of Gen Z adults said they would not get vaccinated, with only 17% indicating they didn’t know if they would; in March 2021, those numbers stood at 26% and 19%, respectively.
"The COVID-19 vaccine rollout has spotlighted not only partisan and racial divisions in willingness to receive a vaccine, but generational differences too," said Nick Laughlin, managing director at Morning Consult. "As more Gen Z’ers plan to not get vaccinated, we've also consistently tracked higher comfort among the generation to their normal routines throughout this past year."
The political divides over vaccinations — with just 50% of Donald Trump voters reporting plans to get inoculated, compared to 80% of Joe Biden voters — make the shift in Gen Z and Millennial attitudes even more conspicuous, as young voters tend to be much more progressive than older voters."
Source: https://www.lx.com/coronavirus/gen-z-interest-in-covid-19-vaccine-plummets-as-country-reopens-new-poll-finds/33399/
Commentary: This is concerning; while the pandemic is abating, thanks to vaccination, it's a long way from over. We need as many people as possible to get vaccinated, as quickly as possible, so that we achieve herd immunity and shut down mutation as much as possible.
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Isolation is impossible for many for financial reasons. "While functioning test and trace systems have stuttered into life with differing degrees of speed, depending on the country, support for people forced to self-isolate has universally lagged.
“What’s driving the majority of background community transmission is non-modifiable by individual choices,” says Muge Cevik, co-author of a recent editorial in The BMJ, who researches infectious diseases at the University of St Andrews. “Economically marginalised communities generally cannot simply choose immediately to modify their transmission networks through changes to their living or working contexts in the absence of specific support.”
Covid-19 is known to have disproportionately affected the poorest in society, often in jobs that either cannot be done from home or are unstable, or in industries such as hospitality that are not stable enough to survive the closures that lockdowns and social distancing have wrought. To stop working and isolate is to cut off your livelihood with immediate effect.
It’s not that they aren’t reaching out for help either: the UK Labour Party says nearly three quarters of people who applied for discretionary grants from local councils were denied the funding despite being asked to self-isolate by the NHS Test and Trace app.
And it’s not only financial support to stop working that’s needed. People also need help to prevent spreading the virus to others in their households. This is a concern for those needing to self-isolate who have tested positive or been in contact with a positive case, as well as for NHS staff and other key workers who want to protect their families from potential exposure. Or indeed those who live in accommodation too small or unsuitable to isolate properly from the rest of the household."
Source: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n327
Commentary: It's financially unsustainable for someone who works in a physical workplace - like a grocery store - to self-isolate for 2 weeks with no pay. Paid isolation is the only way to ensure that people adhere to the terms of isolation.
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Vaccine supply chain issues. "India has put a temporary hold on all major exports of the AstraZeneca coronavirus shot made by the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s biggest vaccine-maker, to meet domestic demand as infections rise, two sources told Reuters.
The move will also affect supplies to the GAVI/WHO-backed COVAX vaccine-sharing facility through which more than 180 countries are expected to get doses, one of the sources said.
COVAX has so far received 17.7 million AstraZeneca doses from the SII, of the 60.5 million doses India has shipped in total, and many countries are relying on the programme to immunise their citizens.
There have been no vaccine exports from India since Thursday, the foreign ministry's website here shows, as the country expands its own immunisation effort.
“Everything else has taken a backseat, for the time being at least,” said one of the sources. Both sources had direct knowledge of the matter, but declined to be named as the discussions are not public.
“No exports, nothing till the time the India situation stabilises. The government won’t take such a big chance at the moment when so many need to be vaccinated in India.”
India’s foreign ministry and the SII did not immediately reply to requests for comment."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-india-vaccine-idUSKBN2BG27D
Commentary: The vaccine squeeze is on. We need somewhere between 10 and 14 billion doses of vaccine for the planet, annually, so this will be a going concern for some time.
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Vaccines shut down infections. "As vaccine distribution continues, marked with the passing of 100 million in the United States vaccinated last week, four important research communications released yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine describe various successes of vaccination programs among healthcare workers. Three of the letters focus on infection rates among the vaccinated workers and another reported on antibody levels in the blood of vaccinated participants.
One letter (Nir-Paz and colleagues) comes from researchers in Israel, a country which has had one of the fastest mass vaccination programs of any nation. Researchers studied the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNtech mRNA vaccine among healthcare workers. At baseline, 10 percent of the 6,680 healthcare workers across a two medical center campus in Jerusalem were found to be afflicted with covid-19, most of which was believed to be from community (as opposed to hospital) spread. Over an 8-week period beginning in December, nearly 85 percent of the non-infected workers were vaccinated. A notable decline in SARS-CoV-2 cases was seen among healthcare workers starting two weeks after the first dose and remained low one month after vaccination. Importantly, the researchers found that in addition to the vaccine-associated reductions in the number of new cases (including both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections), the number of new infections remained low even when a variant of concern (the United Kingdom B.1.1.7) surged among the general population."
Source: https://brief19.com/2021/03/24/brief
Commentary: More confirmation that vaccines not only stop infections, they substantially cut transmission- even of variants.
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More on variants. "Some updates on the 3 major variants
—more spread throughout the US
—transmissibility of P.1 increased but magnitude unclear
—multiple reports of sera from mRNA and AZ vaccinees show preserved nAbs vs P.1 but no clinical trial to date"
Source:
Commentary: Good news on the vaccines seemingly remaining effective against the P.1 variant.
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Adaptation. "A new "double mutant" variant of the coronavirus has been detected from samples collected in India.
Officials are checking if the variant, where two mutations come together in the same virus, may be more infectious or less affected by vaccines.
Some 10,787 samples from 18 Indian states also showed up 771 cases of known variants - 736 of the UK, 34 of the South African and one Brazilian.
Officials say the variants are not linked to a spike in cases in India.
India reported 47,262 cases and 275 deaths on Wednesday - the sharpest daily rise this year.
The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG), a group of 10 national laboratories under India's health ministry, carried out genomic sequencing on the latest samples. Genomic sequencing is a testing process to map the entire genetic code of an organism - in this case, the virus.
The genetic code of the virus works like its instruction manual. Mutations in viruses are common but most of them are insignificant and do not cause any change in its ability to transmit or cause serious infection. But some mutations, like the ones in the UK or South Africa variant lineages, can make the virus more infectious and in some cases even deadlier.
Virologist Shahid Jameel explained that a "double mutation in key areas of the virus's spike protein may increase these risks and allow the virus to escape the immune system".
The spike protein is the part of the virus that it uses to penetrate human cells."
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56507988
Commentary: This is why vaccination cannot be a rich-country only thing. Poorer countries will harbor the virus, it will mutate, and then it will eventually negate vaccines. We must approach this virus as a single, unified species if we want to defeat it.
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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.
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.