Welcome to the Thursday edition of the COVID Roundup. This twice a week diary series is meant to highlight important issues concerning the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Just remember that #COVIDisNotOver, not by a long shot!
This week has baffled this long time observer of the pandemic. Certainly, case should be rising and the effects of a BA.2 sixth wave should be appearing. But even waste water is plateauing to where I am starting to think that BA.2 isn’t going to produce anything of note in the USA. I am still hedging my bets for a couple of more weeks, but signs so far are very encouraging.
Here are the different topics being covered by this edition:
1) Two new contenders for the dominant COVID variety within the Omicron lineage have emerged, with XE being calculated at 10% more transmissible than BA.2 and the mutated BA.2 + L452R just being discovered. The mutation at L452R is what made the Delta variant so transmissible and deadly.
2) The situation in Shanghai is getting increasingly dystopian and grim, with 26 million plus people in an indefinite lockdown. Can China save face when its Zero COVID policy is clearly no longer working in the megalopolis? There has been increasing pushback against the regime inside China. Watch this space.
3) The wave predicted by many consisting of the BA.2 variant of Omicron has failed to materialize in the USA. While BA.2 has established itself as the dominant strain, cases keep dropping and hospitalizations are at the lowest since right after Alpha and before Delta. This is excellent news for a COVID weary populace, but it has epidemiologists stumped. It is theorized that a paucity of data may be partially responsible as waste water starts to fill in the gaps.
4) People have been quick to declare the pandemic over, which is a problem once a new wave develops. However, the majority of people are reporting that they are still open to pandemic countermeasures on a personal level in a bit of cognitive dissonance. Anecdotally, only 1 in 8 to 1 in 10 are still wearing masks in my very liberal area.
5) The vaccines are alarmingly losing their efficacy against the onslaught of BA.2. Breakthrough infections are becoming alarmingly common once more, and although most of them still do not lead to hospitalization — it is only a matter of time before that changes. Every chance the virus has to mutate against the vaccines due to infection, the more likely our vaccines will not work.
6) Long COVID studies are coming out by the day. The news makes for very depressing reading, especially considering that most people have decided that the pandemic is over. Pulmonary embolisms are significantly more likely after COVID, and many other symptoms are increased in likelihood as well. There is something you can do that helps protect yourself even more… and it is a shocker!
Go ahead and read more about each of these topics below the fold!
New Contenders to the Throne in XE and BA.2 + L452R
There’s a new COVID sheriff in town, a recombination variant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 which has the lovely designation of XE. It may be the most transmissible version of COVID-19 yet! These types of virus recombination are commonplace, so there isn’t a need to be overly alarmed by the emergence of this subvariant. It is calculated that if is does have a fitness advantage, it is only a small one.
I would highly advise caution in this next series of tweets as Dr. Eric Fiegl-Ding is often alarmist. But it definitely bears watching to see what happens in South Africa with the potential for them to have a 5th wave due to a serious BA.2 mutation at L452R. I would keep masking and social distancing regardless of what is happening in the world. Don’t give up just because the rest of America has decided COVID is no longer worth thinking about!
I’d read the whole UNROLLED thread, and especially #5 in the series. If this is fitter than BA.2, we could be in for a world of hurt. Below is the COVID graph for South Africa. It looks like cases are just starting to tick upwards again.
Thankfully, overall cases in South Africa are still low.
A final thought on this news:
A Dystopian Lockdown Happening in Shanghai
Shanghai has locked down for an indefinite amount of time thanks to what is likely the world’s worst Omicron outbreak outside of possibly England. How bad is it getting? There are rare public challenges to official CCP policy within China.
People Declaring Situation “Inhumane” in Shanghai
Jia Ruiling’s* father has been enduring severe pain since 17 March. He has late-stage stomach cancer, but his hospital refused to treat him because Jia’s neighbourhood in Shanghai was under lockdown as a result of a handful of Covid cases.
“We begged the hospital to accept him again and again,” Jia said. “At some point my father was in so much pain that he wanted to take his life. What can we do? Please, help us let the central government know.”
China’s strict zero-Covid policy means all positive cases have to be hospitalised. But in the last few weeks, as case numbers have risen sharply and 26 million people entered a harsh lockdown, mainland China’s most important financial hub has come to a standstill. The number of new daily positive cases exceeded 10,000 for the first time on Monday. Although 38,000 health workers have been shipped in from around China to help, medical resources are overwhelmingly diverted to combat Covid, leaving it difficult for non-Covid patients like Jia’s father to access them.
China has responded by not only deploying an army of doctors, but also its regular army to help enforce discipline AND to test a city full on over 26 million people.
Shanghai is responding to the growing outbreak with yet another round of testing for the entire city. It also is easing its draconian child separation policy under “Zero COVID”.
It remains to be seen if Shanghai is the Waterloo for “Zero COVID” in China or not.
Oh Where Oh Where has the BA.2 Wave Gone?
Why is the COVID BA.2 wave hitting some nations hard, while others seemingly go unscathed? The Daily Beast explores why this may be the case.
After spreading across Asia and Europe, the BA.2 subvariant of the novel coronavirus is now dominant in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Right now, U.S. COVID cases are at a six-month low. But what happens next in the U.S. and nearby countries is hard to predict. Looking to Europe for hints isn’t enormously helpful because, on that continent, BA.2 has behaved… unpredictably. Indeed, unpredictability might be exactly what Americans—and everyone else—should expect as the pandemic enters its 28th month.
A patchwork of public health rules, varying vaccination rates, and differing amounts of natural immunity from past infections mean that no two countries are the same. But even those differences don’t fully explain BA.2’s uneven impact.
Even as waste water monitoring has increased, there have been only a few observable spikes in virus particles being shed by effluents in the sewer systems.
This is a problem when BA.2 is the most dominant variant as measured by waste water. It is ticking up in both the northeast and south regions of the US.
One theory is that too many people here got BA.1 Omicron recently, and that has offered a short window of immunity from reinfections via BA.2.
It looks like data collection may be part of the culprit, and states and the federal government are massaging the numbers.
It looks like the BA.2 wave starts roughly two months into BA.2 being detected and becoming dominant. Puerto Rico could debunk the myth of no future wave. H/t to Denise Oliver Velez for posting this.
If There is a BA.2 Wave, How Will People React?
Even if a wave materializes at this time, the response for the majority of citizens may be a collective shrug.
If the United States has been riding a COVID-19 ’coaster for the past two-plus years, New York and a flush of states in the Northeast have consistently been seated in the train’s front car. And right now, in those parts of the country, coronavirus cases are, once again, going up. The rest of America may soon follow, now that BA.2—the more annoying, faster-spreading sister of the original Omicron variant, BA.1—has overtaken its sibling to become the nation’s dominant version of SARS-CoV-2.
Technologically and immunologically speaking, Americans should be well prepared to duel a new iteration of SARS-CoV-2, with two years of vaccines, testing, treatment, masking, ventilation, and distancing know-how in hand. Our immunity from BA.1 is also relatively fresh, and the weather’s rapidly warming. In theory, the nation could be poised to stem BA.2’s inbound tide, and make this variant’s cameo our least devastating to date.
But theory, at this point, seems unlikely to translate into practice. As national concern for COVID withers, the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing. Community test sites are closing, and even the enthusiasm for at-home tests seems to be on a serious wane; even though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a new deal on domestic pandemic funding, those patterns could stick. Testing and case reporting are now so “abysmal” that we’re losing sight of essential transmission trends, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. “It’s so bad that I could never look at the data and make any informed choice.” Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s impacting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded.
It seems that those who wanted to open everything up and have no restrictions have won. Policy wise, it will be impossible to ring this bell of mass pandemic measures again. People will just refuse to do it if the government is the one telling them to do so. H/t to Greg Dworkin for sharing this with me.
thread
Yet in polling, people keep claiming they are not ready to ditch every pandemic countermeasure yet. Once again, the capacity of my fellow Americans to confuse me has no bounds. I estimate 1 in 10 are still masking, which is the lowest hanging fruit in terms of beating back of the pandemic. H/t to Greg Dworkin once again for sharing.
Even if there are no more waves of the virus, there will be a select group of people who will never be the same — even if they never contracted COVID. Their outcomes in life are now extremely poor, statistically speaking. It's time to talk about the COVID orphans, or the children who have lost their caregivers thanks to this devastating virus.
Losing a parent may be one of the most destabilizing events of the human experience. Orphans are at increased risk of substance abuse, dropping out of school, and poverty. They are almost twice as likely as non-orphans to die by suicide, and they remain more susceptible to almost every major cause of death for the rest of their life.
Because of the pandemic, some 200,000 American children now face these stark odds. Even after two years that have inured the country to the carnage of the coronavirus, the scope of the loss is so staggering that it can be hard to comprehend: Caregiver loss during the pandemic is now responsible for one out of every 12 orphans under the age of 18, and in every public school in the United States, on average two children have lost a caregiver to the pandemic. COVID-19 case counts rise and fall, but “orphanhood doesn’t come and go. It is a steadily rising slope, and the summit is still out of sight,” Susan Hillis, the co-chair of the Global Reference Group on Children Affected by COVID-19, told me. “It’s not like you’re an orphan today and then you’re recovered in two weeks.”
Our Vaccines are Now Starting to Fail Against the Onslaught of BA.2
The FDA is saying that the current vaccines and boosters aren’t “well-matched” for BA.2. Will this open the door for a variant specific vaccine in the near future? The vaccines still mostly prevent severe illness and hospitalization, but as loyal readers know, that isn’t enough to prevent Long COVID.
The second booster still does help — but not for long… I still recommend getting the booster even if the protection it offers is fleeting.
Long COVID Keeps Getting More Alarming by the Study
We are learning more about Long COVID by the day — and the picture being painted is a frightening one. It seems like the culprit behind most of the damage is a massive inflammation triggered by the presences of the virus in the body. Could most Long COVID cases mean the virus stays in the body long term like a ticking time bomb? Scientists are still debating that.
That inflammation and viral attack may lead to a massive increases in certain types of cancer. As if COVID-19 wasn’t bad enough before this!
This may become a chronic condition for millions, if not more people than that. And yet there is no diagnostic criteria, no test to prove or disprove it, and most importantly no SSDI for severely disabled people who are that way because of Long COVID (not like me, although my hours are greatly reduced).
Amongst the most worrying symptoms of COVID is a pulmonary embolism in the lungs. Also, there is a much larger risk of deep vein thrombosis. Those risks are 33 fold (!) and five fold over the before times baseline. Any death due to blood clotting above the baseline is likely due to COVID, even if the virus is not present in a test. This could be a ticking time bomb for millions!
An unusual tool meant to help your eyes see better may be another safeguard against the virus — perhaps because it helps shield your eyes against virus particles. Yep, we're talking about glasses!
Background/aim: A study of patients in the Hubei Province, China, at the beginning of the pandemic demonstrated that among a group of 276 patients admitted to a hospital with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, the proportion of patients who said they routinely wore eyeglasses more than 8 hours per day was lower than in the general population. Therefore, wearing eyeglasses more than 8 hours per day may be protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection, possibly because eyeglasses are a barrier that reduces the frequency with which people touch their eyes. The aim of the study was to determine if eyeglasses protect from COVID-19 infection.
Materials and methods: We used UK Biobank (UKB) data to corroborate findings of the Hubei study in the UK population.
Results: Eyewear was associated with a reduced risk of infection, odds ratio (OR)=0.77. The effects of sex, age, and eyewear were independent and significant at the 95% level. Men are 1.24-times more likely to be infected than women; subjects' risk of infection is less (0.95) for every year of age.
Conclusion: The public at large may profit from wearing glasses, as well as wearing face masks and practicing social distancing.
On a Personal Note...
With all of this in mind, I do not know how much longer I am able to keep posting these diaries. I have a huge project I want to start next month. Also, work has picked up for me at my part time job — I may be converted to full time even though I still feel like total crap on some days. For instance, I was up late the past two nights writing this diary. I feel like I am being given the choice of work + sleep or work + COVID roundups, and my health and work may have to come first.
Also, there is an element of THIS involved:
Not gonna lie, there’s a touch of the lyrics behind this song too (since 2020). As people start to disregard live with the virus (including me), I get less inclined to publish stuff about it.
I will try and continue posting these as long as I am able to, and I will continue trying to post COVID news in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup every morning. I will still do educational issues on schedule if I can as well. This isn’t a goodbye, but it may mean you won’t see me as often.
Thursday, Apr 7, 2022 · 6:43:16 PM +00:00
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bilboteach
Likely the best way to make sure you get my COVID updates in the future no matter where I post them is if you follow me. Just click on my name and it will take you to my personal DKos page. There is a button there to click follow.