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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Kids under 12 by fall. "Coronavirus vaccines may be available for U.S. children as young as six months by the fall, drugmakers say. Pfizer and Moderna are testing their vaccines in children under 12, and are expected to have results in hand by the end of the summer.
Compared with adults, children are much less likely to develop severe illness following infection with the coronavirus. But nearly four million children in the United States have tested positive for the virus since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Doctors continue to see rare cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, a condition linked to Covid-19 that can affect multiple organs, including the heart. Vaccinating children should further contribute to containment of the virus by decreasing its spread in communities.
Pfizer announced on Tuesday that it was moving to test its vaccine in children aged 5 through 12 years. It will begin testing the vaccine in infants as young as six months in the next few weeks.
The company said last month that it expected to apply to the Food and Drug Administration in September for emergency authorization of the vaccine for children ages 2 to 11. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was authorized last month for use in children 12 through 15.
Based on data from an earlier study that assessed safety, Pfizer will give two doses of 10 micrograms each — a third of the dose given to adolescents and adults — to children ages 5 to 11 years, and two doses of three micrograms each to children six months to 5 years.
“We take a deliberate and careful approach to help us understand the safety and how well the vaccine can be tolerated in younger children,” said Dr. Bill Gruber, a senior vice president at Pfizer.
In March, Moderna began testing varying doses of its vaccine in younger children. That trial aimed to enroll 6,750 healthy children in the United States and Canada. Results are not expected till the end of the summer, and the vaccine’s authorization by the F.D.A. will take longer.
“I think it’s going to be early fall, just because we have to go down in age very slowly and carefully,” Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, said on Monday."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/health/us-vaccines-children-fall.html
Commentary: Vaccines will be urgently needed for kids before going back to school, if we want to stave off a fall surge. If you have kids under 12, get them vaccinated as soon as they're eligible.
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Social media proved dangerous. "The dangers of misinformation spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic are known.1 However, software that allows individuals to generate automated content and share it via counterfeit accounts (or “bots”)2 to amplify misinformation has been overlooked, including how automated software can be used to disseminate original research while undermining scientific communication.
We analyzed conversations on public Facebook groups, a platform known to be susceptible to automated misinformation,3 concerning the publication of the Danish Study to Assess Face Masks for the Protection Against COVID-19 Infection (DANMASK-19) to explore automated misinformation.4 We selected DANMASK-19 because it was widely discussed (it was the fifth most shared research article of all time as of March 2021 according to Altmetric5) and demonstrated that masks are an important public health measure to control the pandemic.
A campaign that presumably used automated software6 promoted DANMASK-19 on Facebook groups to disseminate misinformation. The limitations of the study include that the entities responsible for organizing this automated campaign cannot be determined, only public Facebook groups were studied, and only a single high-profile study over a few days was evaluated.
Scientific journals are easy targets of automated software. Possible approaches to prevent misinformation due to dissemination of articles by automated software include legislation that penalizes those behind automation; greater enforcement of rules by social media companies to prohibit automation; and counter-campaigns by health experts."
Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2780748
Commentary: The bottom line is that at least for things that involve national security - and the pandemic is one of them - social networks either need to be regulated or need to step up and regulate themselves better. Facebook has been a hive of disinformation and a platform for factually wrong information to spread like wildfire. I look forward to the lawsuits that people file for damages because of systems like Facebook that prompted people to make bad health choices in the pandemic.
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Hijacking lung cells. "The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has created global health and economic emergencies. SARS-CoV-2 viruses promote their own spread and virulence by hijacking human proteins, which occurs through viral protein recognition of human targets. To understand the structural basis for SARS-CoV-2 viral-host protein recognition, here we use cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to determine a complex structure of the human cell junction protein PALS1 and SARS-CoV-2 viral envelope (E) protein. Our reported structure shows that the E protein C-terminal DLLV motif recognizes a pocket formed exclusively by hydrophobic residues from the PDZ and SH3 domains of PALS1. Our structural analysis provides an explanation for the observation that the viral E protein recruits PALS1 from lung epithelial cell junctions. In addition, our structure provides novel targets for peptide- and small-molecule inhibitors that could block the PALS1-E interactions to reduce E-mediated virulence."
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23533-x
Commentary: SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS-CoV are the only three coronaviruses that are able to hijack lung cells so efficiently, thanks to the way they bind to those cells. It's what makes the disease so dangerous; in doing so, it prompts a massive inflammatory response that effectively causes the body to almost kill itself. These new findings will hopefully create therapeutics that can minimize the damage COVID-19 does to the body down the road.
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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 other people, 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. 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.
3. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home.
4. Stay home 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.
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 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.