But, we're too special to be a blight
Thank you to all workers. Each of us keeps society running and is a hero in our own way. Please accept this belated salutation of respect for International Worker’s Day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there would be a lot less reason to protest for freedom to be exploited if we provided food, shelter and healthcare to all. Instead, the United States continues to demonstrate that it has a long way to go to treat workers with the respect they deserve all of the time, not just hypocritical feel good tales of heroism when we exploit them in trying times.
Amazon workers are being fired for standing up for their own health protection needs. Registered nurses are being fired for coming to work with a garbage bag covering their scrubs and posting the pictures on social media on their own time, suggesting that their protective equipment is as good as trash bags. Then there’s the outrageous series of federal bailouts designed to fatten the over-bulging pockets of CEOs and shareholders while intentionally starving workers of wages, health care, food, rent, heat, and any damned dignity at all.
Lacking experience in the international labor movement, I don’t have much to add to that. With experience in agriculture research, I can say that this is would be a good time to transition priorities to sustainable and secure local small scale food production throughout our communities. Plus, it has been half a year since I threatened to write about agriculture again. I apologize, but due to time, procrastination and my own questions, I’m writing about SARS-Cov-2, which causes COVID-19 in us. And, I can’t let this go without adding my socialist distribution schtick.
First, IANA disease epidemiologist, and this particular branch of epidemiology is moving fast. Update and correct as you may.
COVID-19 is a new annually cycling affliction
Experts are telling us that COVID-19 is out and will be with us for years to come. We can expect future seasonal and regional outbreaks, with subsequent outbreaks perhaps growing smaller as immunity becomes more widespread, but that is not certain.
recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave
In my nonexpert reading, latent infections and mutations might upset these expectations. I tried to find what I could on these subjects over the last few weeks.
What is the current state?
According to worldometers, here were the COVID-19 numbers for the world and a few of hard hit countries by the end of May 1, 2020.
COVID-19, US and World, May 1, 2020 (worldometers.info/coronavirus)
|
Total |
active |
dead |
recovered |
| United States |
1,131,030 |
903,714 |
65,753 |
161,563 |
| world |
3,398,094 |
2,078,571 |
239,448 |
1,080,075 |
First congratulations to the US on your big success of limiting yourself to only 1/3 of the recorded infections. FYI, that was snark on the White House exerting much of it’s pandemic response effort on touting the great job Trump and his minions are doing.
But, here is the main reason I posted those numbers.
Why are so many infections still active?
Only a small fraction of reported cases have resolved as recovered. There is probably a simple explanation, such as we are not following through on testing to know when infections are finished. Whatever the explanation, one problem with finding information on a popular subject is that it can be difficult to find simple answers in the avalanche of coverage.
Uncertainty with that question leads to more questions.
- How many active cases are showing COVID-19 symptoms?
- Assuming that active cases are not all actively symptomatic, does that mean that active cases are people with positive tests for SARS-CoV-2?
- How long can an infection remain active?
- Is the duration of infection similar for all?
- Can mild or asymptomatic cases remain active longer than severe cases?
- Could asymptomatic infections be latent for some time and then flare up into COVID-19 later?
- What are the odds of Cov-SARS2 or a similar coronavirus causing recalcitrant infections, like herpes?
Can coronavirus go latent?
The World Health Organization does bust coronavirus myths, with one point being that people do recover from SARS-COV-2 infections.
That’s comforting, but still leaves room to wonder. Do all infected people, symptomatic and asymptomatic alike, follow similar timelines for elimination? Or, do infected users have to go through symptoms before eliminating the virus? Do some people actually carry the virus for prolonged latent periods.
Here, we must distinguish between two forms of latency.
- One is the period between infection and showing symptoms as the pathogen multiplies in the host.
- The other is when a pathogen can lie dormant within the host and periodically flare up throughout the host lifetime.
The former is bad enough for trying to manage a pandemic. The latter is terrifying to consider for a highly infectious airborne disease. I don’t have the answer for SARS-Cov-2 infections of humans, but I did try to minimize the possibility by asking if any coronaviruses cause the second type of latency in any animals. To date, we have only found a few virus families to have latent phases, most notably herpes and HIV family members. I found no record of latent coronavirus infections in my literature search.
So, given the high number of active cases, I have low confidence in answering if all COVID-19 infections follow similar timelines. OTOH, I am somewhat more confident in concluding that SARS-Cov-2 probably doesn’t have latent infections in humans that can flare up years later.
That is somewhat comforting, but there is more to consider.
Can SARS-Cov-2 evade our vaccine efforts?
Supposing that vaccination is possible, which is far from certain, particularly given that people who were once considered clear are again testing positive, these vaccines might be limited. Viruses can become more dangerous by changing to more virulent forms, or to evade immune responses by changing their protein structures to no longer be recognized by host antibodies.
The good news is that SARS-COV-2 does not mutate as quickly as other viruses during infections, such as HIV, but that does not guarantee that we will be able to develop a vaccine.
However, once again, here I must make a distinction. Viruses can change by either incorporating alterations during replication, or by swapping out whole sections of their genome with other similar viruses. This latter mechanism is known as recombination, and it is well known for coronaviruses.
What are the chances of getting worse through recombining with coronavirus from other animal species?
We can’t answer this yet for SARS-Cov-19, but we do know it is a persistent problem with other coronavirus infections.
Being an unstable RNA virus, part of the viral genome that codes for the S1 spike gene can undergo mutation and recombination so that important antigenic variants can appear irregularly which may evade existing vaccine protection. While conventional vaccines work well against homologous types, new strategies are needed to counter this instability.
Furthermore, we probably are not seeing the worst possible outcome of coronavirus infections. It might be possible for SARS-Cov to recombine with other coronaviruses from humans or other species to form even more deadly and virulent strains. Here is one frightening example from chickens.
Clinicopathological assessment showed that two of the variants caused high fatality rates of 67% and 20% in one-day-old SPF chicks, and all the variants possessed multiorgan tropisms, including trachea, proventriculus and urogenital tissues. Furthermore, the commercial live-attenuated Mass-type vaccine conferred poor protection against these variants. This study identified novel genotypes, serotypes and pathotypes of emerging IBV variants circulating in Taiwan. There is an urgent need for effective countermeasures against these variant strains.
Failing at containment, we now face the much more difficult prospect of dealing with annual coronavirus outbreaks that can recombine with other coronaviruses to make lethal pandemics that avoid our vaccination attempts.
Destablizing our environment makes pandemics more likely
Readers of my work know that I constantly remind us that we are part of nature, not the master of nature. In terms of viruses, this means that our activities that change the climate, disrupt habitats and pollute ecosystems are increasing our risks of acquiring new infectious diseases.
"Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans." disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences
"There’s misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It’s a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it." Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York
Wrap it up
Thanks for making it through this tldr diary. I will finish with politics and economics.
Protesters say they need to get back to work to survive. As I see it, if we all have food and healthcare, and don’t get booted from our homes due to economic responses to COVID-19, then there is little left to protest for. Protest for food, homes and healthcare for all, not to get back to jobs that were already insecure, unrewarding, risky and trending toward serfdom prior to the pandemic.
We are part of many distributions. Humans over the last half century have given too much credit to select members of the top end of them, predators, Homo sapiens, the wealthiest, corporate officers, board members, presidents, etc. It might be one reason a large fraction among us continue to obsequiously defer and lavish more wealth unto the chosen few. And, it is a choice. Money is a means to do things, but we don’t need the wealth disparities we created. Finance experts and CEOs aren’t so smart and aren’t ensuring continuation of civilization so much that we need to lavish them with evermore possessions. On the contrary, we keep giving them more at the risk of a few corrupt elites further increasing attacks on lower classes.
Think about running a football team playing in a league with limited finances. A star scorer can help the team win the league, but if you put too much of the budget into a big star, then you don’t have enough left to put a good team around the star. The same goes for society. Teachers, sanitation workers, domestic workers, responders, healthcare professionals, and service workers deserve respect and rewards as much as obsessive genius CEOs.
Top lovers can’t understand that those below can be so powerful. Those at the top are thought to drive the economy and the economy rules nature. No virus could be more powerful than the economy. But, that is wrong. Trickle down is foolish both economically and ecologically. There is no elite utopia. People are not serfs to be granted favors. And, microbes dominate much of this world and we’re not kicking their collective asses. Our economic systems are contrivances that mean nothing more to our microbial community than how much the economic systems drive us to impact the communities we inhabit.
The masses run the world as much as the elite. The elite cannot survive without the masses. If proper respect is not given, then those masses will test the elite and eventually overthrow them.
