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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"A Colorado-based health system says it is denying organ transplants to patients not vaccinated against the coronavirus in “almost all situations,” citing studies that show these patients are much more likely to die if they get covid-19.
The policy illustrates the growing costs of being unvaccinated and wades into deeply controversial territory — the use of immunization status to decide who gets limited medical care. The mere idea of prioritizing the vaccinated for rationed health resources has drawn intense backlash, as overwhelmingly unvaccinated covid-19 patients push some hospitals to adopt “crisis standards of care,” in which health systems can prioritize patients for scarce resources based largely on their likelihood of survival.
UCHealth’s rules for transplants entered the spotlight Tuesday when Colorado state Rep. Tim Geitner (R) said it denied a kidney transplant to a Colorado Springs woman because she was not vaccinated against the coronavirus. Calling the decision “disgusting” and discriminatory, Geitner shared a letter that he said the patient received last week from UCHealth’s transplant center at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in the city of Aurora."
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/05/uchealth-transplant-unvaccinated/
Commentary: Unlike race, gender, or other defining characteristics, vaccination status is fully a choice that anyone can make, at least in the USA. The science behind the decision is also sound; organ transplants already place a patient at considerable risk due to immunosuppressants needed to make the transplant work. Adding COVID risk on top of that does indeed make survival less likely.
In general, at least in the USA where vaccines are plentiful and available, I have no problem with tiered medical care. A vaccinated person who is having a cardiac event does not deserve to die in triage because the ICU is full of people who didn't get vaccinated.
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Yale University reaches 99.5% vaccination rate. "Yale currently has the second-most vaccinated undergraduate student body population in the Ivy League, with 99.5 percent of undergraduates having received a full COVID-19 vaccination, according to the most-recent publicly available data.
Yale’s vaccination rate has crept steadily upwards this fall as administrators have pursued efforts to make the vaccine readily available to Yale affiliates and encouraged them to take the vaccine. The University’s COVID-19 policy is that faculty, staff, students and postdoctoral and postgraduate trainees must be vaccinated to use Yale facilities unless they have a specific vaccination exemption, which may currently be requested for medical or religious reasons.
“We are very pleased with the high rates of vaccination that we achieved through new policies, programs to make it easy to be vaccinated, frequent communication about vaccines and exemptions, and the partnership and commitment of so many members of our campus community,” Stephanie Spangler, the University’s COVID-19 Coordinator, wrote in an email to the News.
Yale’s undergraduate vaccination rate tops that of seven other Ivy League schools, second only to Columbia University, which currently boasts a rate of 99.7 percent.
Vaccination rates for Yale’s Ivy League peers are broadly very high. While the schools break down their publicly-available COVID-19 data differently, the dashboards all reflect consistently high rates: Cornell University and Princeton University are both at 99 percent, Brown University is at 98.8 percent, Harvard University is at 95 percent and Dartmouth College is at 92 percent. The University of Pennsylvania does not appear to publish vaccination data."
Source: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/06/yales-vaccination-rate-reaches-second-highest-in-ivy-league-as-university-reports-zero-undergraduate-covid-19-cases-in-the-last-week/
Commentary: I think there's an element of tribalism and competition that could be made to work for vaccination as well, competitions between entities who are naturally competitive in other endeavors. Which baseball team boasts the highest vaccination rate? Which Division I league? Which fandom or ship? There are so many ways to use this psychological tendency for positive public health outcomes.
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Keep an eye on China. "The World Health Organization (WHO) says increased surveillance is urgently required to better understand what’s behind a recent spike in human cases of H5N6 bird flu in mainland China.
Only 48 people have been infected with H5N6 bird flu since the first confirmed case in 2014, but a third of those were reported in mainland China during the past 3 months alone. Half of all cases were reported during the past 12 months.
“Wider geographical surveillance in the China affected areas and nearby areas is urgently required to better understand the risk and the recent increase of spill over to humans,” a WHO spokesperson told BNO News.
H5N6 bird flu is known to cause severe illness in humans of all ages and has killed more than half of those infected. While there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission, a 61-year-old woman who tested positive in July denied having contact with live poultry."
Source: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2021/10/who-calls-for-surveillance-to-explain-rise-in-human-cases-of-h5n6-bird-flu/
Commentary: The good news is that this flu hasn't spread like crazy, influenza vaccines are available, and continuing to mask up against COVID-19 also defeats the flu. If you're always masked, you're substantially safer against ALL known respiratory pathogens and diseases, not just COVID-19.
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Uh, that's kind of crazy. "Less than 24 hours after Idaho Gov. Brad Little departed the state to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin signed an executive order as acting governor banning vaccine passports or mandatory COVID-19 testing at K-12 schools and universities in Idaho.
In a tweet, McGeachin wrote that she "fixed" Little's executive order on vaccine passports, which was originally issued in April, to include K-12 schools and universities.
Less than ten minutes after McGeachin announced her executive order, Little responded on Twitter, stating he did not authorize McGeachin to act on his behalf and "I will be rescinding and reversing any actions taken by the Lt. Governor when I return."
Little is currently in Texas, along with nine other Republican governors, to visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday."
Source: https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/politics/idaho-lt-gov-janice-mcgeachin-vaccine-passport-order-covid-19/277-38c2fcb5-814b-4d33-ac7a-d9c6575cfe64
Commentary: I could see if they were members of different political parties but... they're not.
What the pandemic has also shown us, through the actions taken by government officials in various locales, is where you might want to live based on the values you support. For those who believe in things like science, Idaho is probably not one of those places.
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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.