We’re just putting out our periodic reminder on getting the word out to PoC communities to encourage booster uptake as the latest COVID wave in the US starts to pick up steam — not only BA.2, but now as we’re discovering, a number of “sub-sub level mutations” starting in the NE and Florida. It’s hard to know about severity this early in a wave—the numbers for people in the hospital or urgent-care clinics are always a few weeks behind the initial leap in cases (and even that’s hard to know due to under-counting from all the home-testing). But the waste-water and percent positive numbers are going up all over the country, and from our nursing and doctors contacts in the earliest wave areas (New England and New York mainly), the severity does not appear to be any less than the previous waves. The earliest states up there are already starting to see the hospitalizations begin rising again, so it’s starting to look this latest wave is having the same kind of shape as the previous ones.
It’s all the more reason to vigorously get the word out for PoC communities to get boosted (and vaccinated if they haven’t gotten their shots yet). There’s no herd immunity with the way that COVID mutates like this, but for omicron, the vaccines and esp the boosters have been shown to reduce the rate of severity and hospitalization greatly, and timely boosters are important because the immunity wanes after a few months. We just talked to a nurse up in Mass. (cousin of one of our precinct members) and she warned us esp. down in Florida do not take this COVID strain lightly. It looks mild for a lot of people at first, but once it takes hold and spreads (COVID gets through a lot of blood vessels due to the receptors it binds to), patients can get sicker and worsen very quickly, and then it’s very hard for the hospital to help them recover.
Again it’s worth repeating, the public service campaign to improve vaccine uptake for PoC communities in spring and summer of 2021 has been one of the great public health successes in recently US history. Because of this—and other improvements, like improved mask-wearing, better ventilation and air filters in many shops—saw a complete reversal of the COVID death and hospitalizations stats from 2020—where African-Americans, Latinos, native Americans, MENA Americans and Pacific Islanders were hardest-hit—with these groups being the most protected in 2021. (This is the reason for all those news stories recently about Republican counties now having cumulative by far the highest COVID death rate—US conservatives by and large don’t vaccinate or get boosted, and because they don’t mask up much, the amount of virus they inhale when they get sick is much higher, which then makes their COVID cases a lot worse.) Red States and heavily Republican counties were decimated by the delta and omicron waves, while Democratic counties and PoC communities were much more lightly affected.
The problem now is that with the need for COVID boosters due to the wane in the earlier vaccine immunity after a few months, once again there’s a gap in PoC uptake of the boosters. And as this newest COVID wave in spring 2022 starts to surge again, it’s urgent to spread the word and organize efforts again to encourage PoC communities to get a timely COVID booster shot, as well as to get and wear good-fitting, quality masks, testing (and early treatment if infected) and social-distancing, esp if they’re frontline essential workers exposed to the public. We had great success in encouraging vaccine uptake among PoC in spring and summer 2021, and can and must do this again here. COVID unfortunately is a very persistent, contagious and deadly virus, and even for those who escape severe illness, long COVID and organ damage are a frequent danger. It’s still a long battle ahead, and for PoC in particular on the front lines of our shops and workplaces, it’s essential to encourage boosters to prepare their immune systems and good masks to reduce transmission levels.