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 a qualified healthcare provider who knows your specific medical situation over advice from people on the Internet.
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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Commentary: I was thinking about retiring this newsletter at the end of the year - and then Omicron came along.
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Omicron symptoms may differ. "People infected by omicron in South Africa are showing very different symptoms to those suffering from the delta strain, said the doctor who alerted government scientists to the possibility of a new variant.
Patients who contracted it complain of fatigue, head and body aches and occasional sore throats and coughs, said Angelique Coetzee, who is also chairwoman of the South African Medical Association. Delta infections, by comparison, caused elevated pulse rates, resulted in low oxygen levels and a loss of smell and taste, she said.
After weeks of almost no Covid patients at her practice in Pretoria, the capital and epicenter of South Africa’s current surge, Coetzee said she suddenly started seeing patients complain of the symptoms on Nov. 18. She immediately informed the government’s Ministerial Advisory Council on Covid-19, and laboratories the next week identified a new variant, she said."
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-29/doctor-who-saw-omicron-early-says-symptoms-different-to-delta
Commentary: The loss of smell and taste has been a hallmark of COVID-19 since almost the beginning. That it has changed to now exhibit different symptoms means detection will be harder, as people are accustomed to looking for a certain set of indicators. Just this morning, a friend of mine in Denmark tested positive but did not have the loss of smell and taste; we'll find out which variant they have shortly.
Two key points here: first, mask up. Omicron is behaving differently but it stil has to obey basic physics. Second, if you experience the symptoms above, go get tested. At this point, any cold or flu like symptoms should mean you go get tested for COVID-19 - the sooner we find out how widespread Omicron is, the better.
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Omicron's origins unclear. "Dutch health authorities announced on Tuesday that they found the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus in cases dating back as long as 11 days, indicating that it was already spreading in western Europe before the first cases were identified in southern Africa. The RIVM health institute said it found Omicron in samples dating from November 19 and 23.
Those findings predate the positive cases found among passengers who came from South Africa last Friday and were tested at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.
"It is not yet clear whether the people concerned [in the earlier cases] have also been to southern Africa," the RIVM said, adding that the individuals had been informed of their Omicron infections and that local health services had started contact tracing.
Belgium and Germany have also said that sample tests confirm the variant was in those countries before South African health officials alerted the world on November 24 to its existence.
South African scientists have been praised for first detecting the new variant and alerting global health authorities to it last week. But Omicron has now spread to about 20 other countries, and amid mounting concern that it could be significantly easier to pass from person to person, and that it could have at least some resistance to current treatments and vaccines, many nations have imposed travel restrictions on passengers from southern African nations."
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/omicron-variant-covid-in-europe-netherlands-before-alert-raised/
Commentary: South Africa has some of the best genetic sequencing labs in the world. They've had to, to deal with the myriad of diseases like HIV that have emerged over the decades. We all owe them quite a bit of thanks for even detecting Omicron.
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Omicron possibly more resistant to vaccine efforts. "The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling Omicron than earlier strains of coronavirus and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies could manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.
Stéphane Bancel said the high number of Omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa suggested that the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He added: “I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked to . . . are like, ‘This is not going to be good’.”
The Moderna chief executive’s comments come as public health experts and politicians have tried to strike a more upbeat tone about existing vaccines’ capacity to confer protection against Omicron."
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/27def1b9-b9c8-47a5-8e06-72e432e0838f
Commentary: Get your boosters now if you're eligible. Why? Delta is still in circulation and for the moment, the dominant strain. Getting a booster if it's available and you're eligible takes the wind out of its sails for the same reason you're advised to get a flu shot - every opportunity to reduce what's infectious is a good thing so that we can see more clearly how much of a pain Omicron and subsequent descendants will be.
And for heaven's sake, mask up with N95/FFP2 masks or better, all the time indoors in places that aren't your home.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wear the best mask available to you when you'll be around people you don't live with, even after you've been vaccinated. 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. Verify your mask's NIOSH certification here: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/usernotices/counterfeitResp.html
3. Get vaccinated as soon as you're able to, and fulfill the full vaccine regimen. Remember that you are not vaccinated until everyone you live with is vaccinated. If you received an adenovirus vaccine (J&J/AstraZeneca), consider getting an mRNA single shot booster (Pfizer/Moderna) if permitted.
4. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home.
5. Stay out of indoor spaces that aren't your home and away from people you don't live with as much as practical. Minimize your contact with others and avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
6. Aim to have 3-6 months of living expenses on hand in case the pandemic gives another crazy plot twist to the economy.
7. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
8. 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).
9. Masks must fit properly to work. Here's how to properly fit a mask:
10. If you think you may have been exposed to COVID-19, purchase a rapid antigen test. This will detect COVID-19 only when you're contagious, so follow the directions clearly. https://amzn.to/3fLAoor
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines can shed or otherwise harm people around you.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid19vaccine-reproductivepro-idUSL1N2MG256
There is no mercury or other heavy metals in the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/09/1013538/what-are-the-ingredients-of-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines pose additional risks to pregnant women.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983
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/
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/are-we-ignoring-the-hard-truths-about-the-most-likely-cause-of-covid-19-20210601-p57x4r.html
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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Disclosures and Disclaimers
I declare no competing interests on anything I share related to COVID-19. I am employed by and am a co-owner in TrustInsights.ai, an analytics and management consulting firm. I have no clients and no business interests in anything related to COVID-19, nor do I financially benefit in any way from sharing information about COVID-19.
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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.