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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It's not over. We may be in the 7th inning, but there's a lot of game left to play, and the virus is coming on strong thanks to the new variants.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#all-charts-preview
Commentary: What we're seeing is growth of the virus in many locales where it was under control - especially nations in the EU. Even wealthy countries with access to vaccines more readily are showing increases, because of the B.1.1.7 variant. You wouldn't walk off the field at the top of the 7th inning and just let the other team do whatever it wants. Nor should we toss precautions aside. We don't have much more to go - keep protecting yourselves and your communities. Keep pressure on your government officials to remain stringent and diligent about things like mask wearing.
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3 foot rule in schools in dispute. "Late last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued updated guidance on school reopening, saying that 3 feet, not 6 feet, of physical distancing between students was sufficient in most elementary schools—regardless of the level of community spread of COVID-19.
At the same time that CDC officials were updating school policy, they were also warning that B117, a variant strain 50% more transmissible than the wild-type virus, would likely become the dominant strain in the United States by April. In some states, such as Florida and California, the variant, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, already accounts for 25% of cases.
Now several experts are concerned that schools may be opening during an inflection point in the pandemic and are being misguided about how to do so.
Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, publisher of CIDRAP News, is worried B117 will lead to a different level of transmission than the country has seen before.
"We're already seeing substantial transmission," said Osterholm, who had supported the opening of K-8 schools given the dynamics of the wild type virus. Osterholm said the CDC recommendations were based on data done when only the original, wild-type virus was circulating, not B117.
"What little science supports 3 versus 6 feet goes out the window here. Is 6 feet even safe?" he said.
In Europe, where schools have been opened since the fall, some countries, have now had to close doors in light of the spread of the B117 variant. Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, have all confirmed B117 outbreaks in schools.
Moreover, the recommendation still ignores aerosol transmission of the virus, said Donald Milton, MD, DrPH, MOH, of the University of Maryland in College Park.
"The concept of 3 feet or 6 feet is based on droplet spray in the first place," Milton said. "If we were only talking about spray-borne transmission, that distance is important. But that's not what's happening at this point."
The Massachusetts study, according to Milton and Brosseau, also fails to address the real-world challenges schools present to infection control.
"The elephant in the room is lunch," Milton said. "We know a high-risk activity is dining. People can't eat with a mask on. I don’t see people talking about that in the context of schools.""
Source: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/experts-3-foot-rule-schools-problematic-light-covid-variants
Commentary: Based on knowledge that B.1.1.7 is more transmissible in part because you're contagious longer, ventilation and preventing children from removing masks indoors for any reason must be essential. That means serving meals and such outdoors, where children can safely remove masks, and maintaining substantial distance as they do so. No one should be eating indoors, period, except in the comfort of their homes.
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Unsurprisingly, mental health declined during the pandemic. "During August 2020–February 2021, the percentage of adults with recent symptoms of an anxiety or a depressive disorder increased from 36.4% to 41.5%, and the percentage of those reporting an unmet mental health care need increased from 9.2% to 11.7%. Increases were largest among adults aged 18–29 years and those with less than a high school education.
Trends in mental health can be used to evaluate the impact of strategies addressing adult mental health status and care during the pandemic and to guide interventions for disproportionately affected groups."
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e2.htm?s_cid=mm7013e2_w
Commentary: Mental health will be a long-term problem after the pandemic winds down. The best we can do right now is keep checking in on the people we care about and being proactive about outreach. One of the dangers of the digital world that we've been living in for the past year is that it's not clear when someone's in trouble unless they explicitly mention it. Check in with folks in non-public forums and make sure they're actually okay, no matter how rosy their public social media feeds are.
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Still no closer to the origins of SARS-CoV-2. "By the time the scientists investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in the Chinese city of Wuhan convened on March 10 for a virtual press conference, more than a year had passed since the World Health Organization asked Beijing for permission to admit them. During this time, as more than 2.6 million people died of COVID-19 and millions more suffered lasting effects of the illness, the mystery of the coronavirus' origins has loomed.
There is broad agreement that the coronavirus is part of a lineage of viruses found in horseshoe bats in South China. The mystery centers on how the virus came to cause an outbreak in Wuhan, a thousand miles away, without leaving any trace of its journey.
With almost no data, we can't be certain of any theory. We could concoct a theoretical game of hopscotch in which the virus randomly transmits from host to host, accumulating mutations along the way, threading the needle of cities and villages and South China wet markets, and landing in downtown Wuhan ready for its coming-out party. It's not impossible. It's just getting-struck-by-lightning-while-being-eaten-by-a-shark unlikely.
And if it did happen, it should have been part of a noticeable pattern. In a long, meandering chain of transmissions, each node branching into new infections, Wuhan would have been just one twig of a full-fledged tree—the kind of tree epidemiologists use to trace viral evolution. Even if most other branches eventually died out, the entire tree could not have disappeared without leaving a trace. And yet it doesn't exist. Most of the scientific evidence points toward COVID-19 beginning in Wuhan in October or November 2019. Despite a year of intense searching, not a single close ancestor of the virus has been found. As a group of 26 scientists stated in a recent letter calling for a new, objective investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, "There is as yet no evidence demonstrating a fully natural origin of this virus." It's as if it just teleported from South China to Wuhan."
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/humans-not-animals-likely-took-covid-virus-wuhan-contrary-chinas-claims-1578861
Commentary: We still don't - and possibly may never know - the full origins of the pandemic, but this article does lay out an intriguing, logical hypothesis: it may have been brought to Wuhan by humans, not animals. The key takeaway, however, is that until there is credible proof, no speculation of how the pandemic started can be said to be reliable. Anyone saying they know what really happened is lying, and probably has an agenda to promote.
"We don't know" is the hardest explanation for everyone to accept these days, but at the moment, it's still the only truthful explanation.
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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.