Welcome to the inaugural Tuesday COVID Roundup. In this issue, BA.2 is starting to take the USA by storm, yet it seems like the nation isn’t willing to take collective action to stop it before it potentially gets bad. But will it be a terrible wave or not? This is what COVID twitter has been debating for the past 2-3 WEEKS. That’s how long we’ve known that BA.2 could produce a potential wave here!
1) There are largely two camps when it comes to how severe the BA.2 wave will be. There is a group looking at Denmark/South Korea/Hong Kong and proclaiming we are going to see a similar result here because of how poorly America is reacting to the possibility of a wave and the abysmally low vaccine uptake. There is another group that insists that the wave will be felt, but it will not nearly be as severe as everyone is Chicken Little like in the other camp. Me? I try to straddle the two camps as they both present good evidence.
2) The citizens of the United States are literally giving a collective shrug to the news that a new wave is coming and a new threat is here. It is a combination of government encouragement that the pandemic is over, pandemic fatigue even amongst the most cautious of people, and attention being drawn elsewhere (such as Russia-Ukraine). COVID no longer makes front page news or the nightly news broadcasts consistently.
3) Get ready for COVID-care rationing because the federal government is out of funds to fight the pandemic. I reported on this last week, but there has been little development since then as all eyes are drawn to Ukraine and confirming Justice KBJ. This also means that the COVID mitigation measures will stop being funded.
4) Scientists are increasingly turning their attention to the next pandemic, which is the avalanche of Long COVID symptoms and documentation necessary to prove it exists. Also, they are trying to find ways to treat it through medicine. As a Long COVID sufferer, these results cannot come back soon enough for me.
See individual examples of each of the above issues below the fold.
Will the BA.2 Wave Be Bad? Or NOT SO FAST!
It cannot be denied that the US is about to enter a BA.2 wave similar to East Asia and Western Europe. It is primarily based off of reinfection of previously infected people as the virus has basically touched everyone at least once.
I wrote a rec list diary about a week ago on the many different signs that are present that BA.2 is about to create a surge of cases in the USA.
What is still up for debate is how severe the upcoming BA.2 wave will be. A majority of COVID twitter is sounding the alarm, starting with these three stakeholders.
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But not so fast my friends! There is a critical minority who are arguing that the USA has a few advantages over other nations, and that this wave will exist but it will more likely be a brief and small surge.
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I officially straddle the fence in between the two camps, as it is my job to try and be as objective as possible. Personally, I am in the Eeyore alarmist camp and I think we will be in for a world of hurt in April and May.
Pandemic Fatigue Makes Us Not Care… and More Vulnerable
It cannot be said enough that this wave will be different primarily because most people don’t give two fucks about COVID anymore. The pandemic has gone on too long, and most people assume that it is over because we as a species aren’t geared to be in survival mode like this for years at a time. Even the ER doctors and biggest proponents of writing about the pandemic (like me) are tired!
Problem is, the virus don’t care how tired you are of it. All it cares about is replicating its genome and spreading to the next host. Even children are starting to get more and more skin in the game, though thankfully this is still quite rare.
Yet all we care about is returning the rugrats to the babysitter school and yelling at the institution if it even hints at trying to use any sort of pandemic mitigation strategy such as masking.
It looks like Biden is planning a phased 4th vaccine rollout, with those 50+ being eligible very soon!
Problem is, very few care about getting another shot — too many aren’t getting their shots before this 4th one comes to begin with. And that is why I feel the BA.2 wave will be a bad one.
Even the added costs being added to being unvaccinated isn’t causing compliance. It is only causing more complaint by this vocal and frankly highly annoying minority within our society.
I write to help individuals at this point, as any collective action the USA takes is doomed to fail due to noncompliance. Sorry to say it so bluntly, but we have failed as a society and the rot just gets worse the deeper inwards you look. Here’s what we face in trying to achieve a unified societal message.
COVID-Care “Death Panels” are Coming… and Defenses are Standing Down
Blame the GQP as usual. They have decided to block all further attempts at funding the COVID Pandemic Response Funds unless they are "clawed back” from existing funds (most of which is already spent). The Democrats don’t have the votes to do it the way the GQP wants either. That means things are about to happen. Bad things. Terrible things. Our defenses against the pandemic are shutting down.
It will be every family for themselves, so be prepared!
Why is this fund so important? It not only funds the defenses above, it helps mitigate the disease by funding hospital cures, vaccines, Paxlovid pills, and PCR tests for everyone. Here are the consequences.
FULL THREAD HERE
This is an unmitigated disaster waiting to strike the United States. While some may be happy that the anti-vax uninsured now have to pay, there are plenty on our side that cannot afford insurance and thus cannot afford the tests. Plus, having our hospitals clogged with cases once again is terrible, especially for our health care heroes who are on Year 3 of this slow torture. Please, beg your Congress critters to restore this funding!
Fight Against Long COVID Just Starting
Good news on the Long COVID front: doctors may be able to officially diagnose Long COVID very soon! The study just has to be peer reviewed and replicated by independent people not associated with the study. Great thing is this should work even if you never got tested!
Dogs also seem to be able to be trained to detect Long COVID. This was a cool study to read, and it gives us hope that Long COVID can be detected and thus officially diagnosed!
Pharmacologists combined with scientists are looking for treatments that work on Long COVID, and it should help with other chronic illnesses that have a similar profile of symptoms. This may be the biggest breakthrough in bringing chronic illness out of the murky shadows and into accepted diagnostic and treatable discourse!
Those are in the future, but there is something in the present everyone who wants to avoid my fate can do: get the DAMN VACCINE FOLKS!
I do have to point out that this disability could have an effect on up to 30% of the population shortly after an infection, and an unknown amount of people (like me) for the rest of their lives.
It was good to read about excellent Long COVID news for a change, rather than all of the damage this damn virus can cause over the short and intermediate terms. Remember, there is no word on how much damage this virus will cause in the long time frame (5+ years).
Conclusion
I try my hardest to stay neutral, but all of the above paints a grim picture of where we will be for the next couple of months. For most people, it will be no worse than the prior omicron wave. They will wonder what all of the fuss is about. But the power of large numbers means that the hospitals will be full of cases once again and deaths will skyrocket. My Eeyore side is fully returning, even though there are some encouraging signs even in the middle of all of this darkness.
I am tired of COVID being swept under the rug and pretended like it’s over or it doesn’t exist any longer. All it takes is one recombination or the virus to hit the right mutations and we are all back to square one. Yes, it is unlikely, but the virus has done many other things once deemed improbable in the last two and a half years. It is time to stop underestimating the virus and overestimating human intelligence. We’re being licked by an entity that scientists are still debating whether or not it qualifies as life. As a society, we are increasingly waving the white flag as well.
Tuesday, Mar 29, 2022 · 11:48:30 AM +00:00 · bilboteach
I will serve as the Morning Thread once again. Here are some pundits and Op-eds about COVID 19:
Megan Ranny writes the following Op-ed in the Washington Post about the Vulnerability to COVID Our Health Care System Has
Have Americans really forgotten the early days of the pandemic, when we rallied to “flatten the curve” to preserve health care for the sick? What happened to that spirit? We need to renew our commitment to shore up our health infrastructure and invest in health-care workers, now.
The U.S. health-care system had plenty of problems before the pandemic, from overcrowding in emergency departments to insufficient mental health services. But never, in my 20 years of practice, have I seen the kind of dysfunction — day in and day out — currently afflicting providers and patients.
Recent surveys indicate that somewhere between 30 percent and 66 percent of nurses are considering leaving their profession because of pandemic-related stress. As many as 18 percent of health-care workers have already left the industry during the pandemic. In my own specialty, the proportion of emergency physicians reporting burnout has increased from 43 percent to 60 percent during the pandemic. Health-care workers also report increasing rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Workplace violence against health-care workers is rising. Instead of being hailed as “heroes,” we find ourselves questioned, underappreciated, abused and struggling to provide basic standards of care.
Meanwhile, a group of scientists who study virus evolution write an Op-ed in the New York Times explaining Where COVID-19 Will Go From Here.
As scientists who study how viruses evolve, we are often asked about the future of the coronavirus. Will it go away? Get worse? Fade into the background of our lives? Become seasonal like the flu?
Here’s what we know: The virus’s Omicron variant was significantly more infectious and more resistant to vaccines than the original strain that first emerged in Wuhan, China. There’s no reason, at least biologically, that the virus won’t continue to evolve. The coronavirus variants that have emerged thus far sample only a fraction of the genetic space that is most likely available for evolutionary exploration.
Finally, Danny Altmann writes a provocative Op-ed in the Guardian stating flat out that the UK Cannot Pin Their Hopes on Boosters Forever
Having started out brilliantly, the real-life state of play today is self-evidently suboptimal. The vaccines rapidly induce hugely high levels of protective, neutralising antibodies in most people, but these levels wane within months of each sequential dose. Meanwhile, Omicron and the subvariant BA.2 have managed to mutate almost every amino acid residue targeted by protective antibodies, escaping protection. And so you have the unhappy equilibrium currently endured by the UK: more than 300,000 new cases a day, as of late last week, and a continuing caseload of more than 3 million, with hospital admissions and excess deaths holding steady at a new – high – setpoint. All this despite one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
We are living in a precarious truce imposed through frequent mRNA boosters to keep the viral caseload “manageable”. But there are signs this isn’t sustainable, and that a strategy simply consisting of boosters in perpetuity may not be fit for purpose. Recent case surges in Hong Kong, Denmark and Scotland emphasise the fragility of that balance. And new evidence from the past two years suggests that encounters with different variants of Covid or different vaccine types can alter the effectiveness of later jabs in surprising ways – an effect called immune imprinting. This raises the possibility that booster performance could be even less predictable and effective in the future.