XB what? BQ huh? Do you need to keep up with Omicron’s ever-expanding offspring? https://t.co/OFq4ZwwRRy
— STAT (@statnews) January 12, 2023
It’s like clockwork now. Every few months, we’re warned that the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spawned yet another subvariant, this one even more transmissible than the ones it is fast overtaking.
The new entity is given a name, an unwieldy string of letters and numbers separated by periods. There’s discussion — some of it breathless — on Twitter and in the media about the threat the new subvariant poses. People who are still following Covid-19 news worry. People who are determined to ignore Covid pay no attention…
The cycle has some experts wondering about how useful these discussions are. We aren’t, after all, obsessing about which strain of H3N2 flu has been causing most of the illness that has cycled through the United States in this abnormally early flu season. That’s because new strains of existing flu viruses may make us more vulnerable to infection, but they don’t render us defenseless against influenza. The same is true with SARS-2 subvariants — but that sometimes gets lost in the back and forth.
“This keeps happening every couple of months. I sort of feel like it’s Groundhog Day, except with ‘scariants,’” said Angela Rasmussen, a coronavirus virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, using a term coined by Eric Topol.
(For the record, Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, disagrees vehemently with the notion that people don’t need to pay much attention to which variant or subvariant is currently circulating, arguing among other things that the public discussion could encourage more people to get the latest booster shots.)…
Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s point person for Covid-19, confessed she’s surprised that she is still quoted saying this subvariant or that subvariant is more transmissible than the ones that came before. “I say that every time,” she said. Each new variant or subvariant must be more transmissible than its predecessor, or it would die out. “That’s what viruses do,” Van Kerkhove said.
She is uncomfortable with the idea of telling people they don’t need to pay attention to the details of each successful version of the virus, preferring to stress that people should understand that the WHO and national public health agencies, scientists, and governments around the globe are monitoring the viral evolution of SARS-2 and constantly assessing whether vaccines still work or need to be updated, whether public health advice should change.
“I don’t want people to be like, ‘Hey, there’s nothing to worry about.’ But I also don’t want to be like ‘The sky is falling,’” Van Kerkhove said. “And frankly, the people who want to listen to us, do. The people who don’t, really, really don’t.”…
“Without vaccination, current infection rates would’ve meant a much higher toll. But overall, though the death rate’s decreased, year over year it hasn’t decreased that significantly. There were 350,000 deaths in 2020, 475,000 in 2021 and 265,000 in 2022.” https://t.co/a9xNSsbtqw
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) January 5, 2023
There is a lot to digest / discuss in this article, so here’s a ‘gift’ (unpaywalled) link:
… The most consequential year of the pandemic in the United States was probably not 2020 but 2021.
Works of serious retrospective history lag works of journalism, inevitably, but one risk of real-time reporting is that we never get around to reckoning with turbulent events with anything like proper hindsight. Instead we are left with accounts focused almost exclusively on the story’s first act. That is where we are now: The list of books devoted to the American pandemic response in 2020 is quite long, and the list of books — or even authoritative long-form reporting — devoted to the following years is minuscule.
This is especially problematic because — judging both by total mortality and by America’s relative performance against its peers — 2021 was far more telling in its failures. In the first year of the pandemic, the United States performed somewhat worse than some of its peers in the wealthy West but not that much worse. We failed to stop the virus at the border, but so did most other countries in the world, and by the end of 2020, the country’s Covid-19 per capita death toll was near the European Union average. The country spent that first year obsessing over mitigation measures and the partisan gaps that governed them: school closures and indoor dining, mask wearing and social distancing. But it was in the pandemic’s second year, in which mortality was defined much less by mitigation policies than by vaccination uptake, that the country really faltered…
The world’s worst pandemic was probably not in the United States or Britain, Italy or Spain, China or India but in Eastern Europe — notably in Russia.
Because medical record keeping varies so much from country to country, official Covid death tolls are a misleading measure of pandemic impact. In wealthy countries, where more testing has been done and causes of death are recorded somewhat more systematically, the numbers appear relatively higher, and in poorer countries, with less testing and somewhat less scrupulous death certificates, they are lower.Excess mortality statistics tell a more reliable story, though because they essentially compare total deaths against recent historical averages for a country, they rely on statistical modeling and the availability of older data. The Economist maintains the best running excess mortality database, and the story it tells about the global toll of the pandemic is very clear. Of the 106 countries included in its data set, the 12 hardest hit were in Eastern Europe, as were 17 of the worst 20. Many of these are small countries; The Economist estimates the two most brutal pandemics in the world were in Serbia and Bulgaria, each with populations under seven million. The third-worst pandemic was in Russia, where there were more than one million excess deaths in a population of more than 140 million, an excess per capita death toll two and a half times as heavy as the American one. (Interesting time to launch a war of choice.)…
Let’s leave the covid origin mystery to scientists, @DavidQuammen writes in a guest opinion https://t.co/igac7jYItn
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) January 23, 2023
Renowned science writer David Quammen, valiantly fighting the unshakeable conspiracy narratives (unpaywalled ‘gift’ link):
One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of a congressional subcommittee. The question is this: Where did the virus that causes covid-19 come from?
The subcommittee, created under a resolution adopted by the House on Jan. 9, is charged with investigating aspects of the pandemic and our national response. Its members (seven Republicans, five Democrats) have still not been named. The origin question is a seductive one, but it is also the mystery that they will be least likely and least qualified to solve — and they should focus their mission elsewhere.
Virologists, epidemiologists, molecular evolutionary biologists and other experts around the globe have studied the origin matter for three years. They have scrutinized the genome of the covid virus and compared it with similar coronaviruses long known from wildlife. They have studied its peculiar features, pondered the ways it evolves and placed it in context among other lethal new viruses…
After the 2003 SARS event, the prospect that another coronavirus could spill from bats into humans and cause even worse devastation was never far-fetched or unimaginable. In fact, I predicted it myself back in 2012, in the book “Spillover” — not through my own prescience but simply by reporting what some of the world’s leading experts on viral ecology and evolution were saying.
Other opinionizers on the covid-19 origin question, mostly amateur sleuths but also some journalists, have argued since early 2020 that this coronavirus came to humans — maybe? probably? definitely? — from a laboratory. There, the narrative goes, it was either assembled by genetic engineering, for nefarious purposes, or modified, in well-meant but reckless experiments, to be more infectious in humans. From the laboratory, according to this hypothesis, it was either intentionally or accidentally released. Some reputable scientists have agreed that a lab leak is theoretically possible and insisted that the possibility should be entertained…
This question of origin is important far beyond our understanding of covid-19. It bears implications for how we shape our societies and institutions in the future, preparing ourselves — or neglecting to prepare — against future pandemic threats.
Consider one implication you might draw from a lab leak: We need less science, especially of the sort that fiddles with dangerous viruses. And from a natural spillover: We need more science, especially of the sort that studies dangerous viruses lurking in wild animals. From a lab leak: It was those foolish scientists in a Chinese lab who unleashed this terrible virus upon us. Suspicion, accusation, presumption of guilt and even a tincture of racism may therefore inform our relations with China, not an effort to encourage transparency and scientific exchange. From a natural spillover: Every one of us who consumes resources drawn from richly diverse natural ecosystems — be it meat or vital minerals for technology, such as coltan and cobalt — shares responsibility for the new viruses that attack humans. Why? Because those viruses reach us when humans invade such ecosystems, including the Congolese forests where coltan is mined, and come into contact with the virus-bearing wildlife living there.
We need to solve this origin conundrum because we need to take action. We need better structures for pandemic preparedness and response in this country, stronger international systems of surveillance for new outbreaks, vastly increased training of molecular biologists and disease field scientists around the world, and fuller collaborations among countries — including China. Only these measures will shore up the failure points that made our response to covid-19 such a disaster.
Congress has an important role to play in all this. But attempting to determine the virus’s origin isn’t it. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic should examine, as it has been chartered to do, the many aspects of this nation’s pandemic response that merit policy review: vaccine development and rollout, taxpayer-funded relief programs, the negative impacts of school closures versus the benefits, and the crucial balance between civil liberties and public health…
Meet the #biology professor who named the surging ‘Kraken’ #Covid variant. He has even more information to help make sense of #Omicron’s ‘alphabet soup’ https://t.co/1MKxLLn123
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) January 7, 2023
Since several commentors have asked about the ‘Kraken’ moniker:
… Do you remember the previously ubiquitous COVID strains BA.4, BA.5, or BQ.1.1? Have you heard of the currently surging XBB.1.5, and do you understand what the tangle of letters and numbers mean? You probably don’t—and some experts say it’s because of the convoluted names. You could be forgiven for thinking another strain of Omicron poses no new threat—especially if you’ve already had Omicron or received the new Omicron booster.
New strains of Omicron are becoming increasingly more transmissible and evasive, with the ability to dodge immunity from prior vaccination and infection. And using the term “Omicron” or something like XBB.1.5 to describe them just isn’t cutting it anymore, Dr. Ryan Gregory, a biology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, told Fortune.
“Kraken” is what he calls XBB.1.5, which the WHO just declared the most transmissible Omicron variant yet. For months, Gregory has worked to offer up “street names” for complicated COVID strains, in a bid to better communicate the evolving Omicron threat to the public…
Gregory likened Omicron and its variants to different species within the mammal family of vertebrates.
“If you said, ‘Oh, what’s that thing in my yard?’ and I said, ‘It’s a mammal,’ you’d say, ‘Is it something that will eat me? Will it steal my vegetables? Does it carry disease? Is it somebody’s pet?’” he explained.
“Omicron” remains a useful descriptor, he maintained. But more than a year after the highly transmissible strain burst onto the global scene, someone needs to name new, concerning variants.
If the WHO won’t, he’s decided he will…
Ken
Scariest line in the whole post.
Brachiator
Covid is more deadly than influenza. And Mother Nature doesn’t care whether you can keep track of all the variants.
Suzanne
@Brachiator: I kind of observe most people having the same general attitude about COVID, at this point, that they do about any health-related issue. I know there are exceptions, but for the most part, the people I know to be health-conscious are willing to engage in COVID-cautious behaviors while those who are not are….not.
New Deal democrat
So I’m guessing that this would not be a good time to mention that last Friday’s update from the CDC for the first time included a “C” variant, as in CH.1.1, which has mutated back in the direction of the more lethal Delta?
raven
@Suzanne: I’ve been having motor problems for almost thee years and nothing has helped. I am determined to lose weight and my MD told me not to lose too much because I’ll need the reserve if I get covid (again)!!
Steeplejack
@raven:
Sorry to hear about the motor problems. Gotta be frustrating for a jock.
Suzanne
@raven: Ughhhh, I’m sorry. That’s rough.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: @raven:
My first thought was that you pegged the situation perfectly, especially frustrating for raven because he’s so active.
Then I laughed out loud at your choice of the word “jock”, because, well, obvious reasons.
Trollhattan
Kraken? Great, if they peg one as Honey Badger I’m going back to lockdown.
James E Powell
I’m not sure what happened in the area of my school – southern Los Angeles county – but there have been more & longer teacher absences since we came back from winter break on January 9. Also too, mask wearing by teachers, staff, & students has doubled.
jonas
As I’ve posted here before, how “transmissibility” and “infectiousness” get framed is really important. I’ve known people — not at all wingnut/anti-vaxxer types — who happily got their first round of shots, but have blown off getting the bivalent booster because they’ve “read so much” about how the vaccines are pretty much useless now against the invincible Omicron variants and so want to wait for some new breakthrough that might actually help. I get the urgency of trying to emphasize the risk these new variants pose, but that has to somehow be balanced with a message about how the new vaccines still “work” in the sense that they dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness. So get the updated vaccine. Only about 30% of us have so far, which is not good.
zhena gogolia
@jonas: It’s like the flu shot in this way: “It doesn’t protect against all the variants, so why bother?” Because you’ll be sick for 3 days instead of 2 weeks?
eclare
@Trollhattan: Hahaha…
raven
@Steeplejack: It’s less the problems than the inability to figure out what’s causing them. I’ve had three rounds of PT, spinal surgery, tons of tests and zip. My latest MRI showed hip arthritis and, when I one to the orthopod he put me on the table and said “dawg, there is nothing wrong with your hip”!!! Gotta keep on pushin!
raven
@jonas: So if we have gotten five should we get another?
zhena gogolia
@raven: That’s what I’m wondering now. We got the bivalent in September.
raven
@zhena gogolia: Millions of posts and little information!!!
Brachiator
@jonas:
The CDC and other agencies have been consistent in saying this.
But some people think, “I have done all I want to do, and it is time to get back to normal.”
On top of this is the strange defiance in the US, Britain and other countries, that insist on seeing public health efforts as a commie liberal plot to impose government control on the people.
I wonder whether people would be so stupid if the death rate from Covid was higher.
dmsilev
@Brachiator:
Probably.
For an ostensibly intelligent species, we can be remarkably stupid.
NotMax
@raven – zhena gogolia
Badfinger.
:)
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: Was Delta really inherently more lethal or did people just have less preexisting immunity back then? I got the impression that in the final analysis it was really more the latter.
Brachiator
@Suzanne:
My immediate family are good about Covid. A cousin works in an office where most people are delusional or in denial, even though some of their coworkers have become seriously ill from Covid.
It’s like parallel worlds.
Suzanne
@jonas: The visual communication about the vaccines is terrible. Like, there should be a very basic infographic that spells out for every age group how many shots/boosters are needed. CHARTS! Well-designed graphics! Information tidily compiled!
People lose track of this stuff. I want to stay on top of it, but I have to keep track of my three Spawns (all of whom are in different age brackets for this thing), SuzMom and SuzIn-Laws (over 70 and with high-risk conditions), as well as Mr. Suzanne and my own damn self. It’s a lot.
Ten Bears
My son is wishing he had listened to the old man.
I suspect he’ll get the jab next week …
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: I got the bivalent booster but I didn’t get a SECOND bivalent booster because the CDC and FDA never told me to, I was trying to follow their recommendations and not bogart vaccine stocks, and I suspect that contributed to my getting sick. So I’m a little resentful of them at the moment though I know they’re trying to manage the messaging as best they can. It’s almost like they need a double-tiered message: “here’s what you can do if you really want to be as safe as possible,” “here’s the minimum you can do to not be a walking menace to public health.”
But I also have some friends who are so hardcore about it, they really insist that we need to reorganize society so that everyone can isolate permanently like in Asimov’s “The Naked Sun”. There are times when I kind of want to do that. Especially since I seem to have permanent Wolfman Jack voice now. The CDC says I can go out in public again but I sound like an infectious menace.
raven
@NotMax: Free Money
raven
@Matt McIrvin: My brother represents his estate!
Wag
In my medical opinion, getting more COVID shots on an annual basis is reasonable, just like flu shots. And just like the flu shot, if the experts who formulate the shot for the season miss the exact strain, not too big a deal. Instead, the goal with repeated boosters is to build a broad based and robust exposure to many strains so eventually we have a strong immune response to whatever variants arise.
JaneE
At the risk of sounding like “it’s just like the flu”, every year they take a best guess at which flu strains will be circulating and create a flu shot tailored for those particular variants. Sometimes they guess wrong, and the flu shots don’t protect you as well as they normally did, but most of the years they get it more right than wrong. Why shouldn’t we keep tabs on Covid variants, at least well enough to see which are the most likely ones to be widely circulating? Better to create a multi-valent shot if we can, but even if we can’t try to pick the most likely one and do an annual booster. Worst case is it is a waste of money all around. At this point, I suspect that much waste would get lost in the rounding of all the other programs around that waste money.
There are still people who do not get annual flu shots. Considering they are convenient and almost if not completely free, those people made their choice. They will probably make the same choice for Covid.
Our county covid transmission rates are fairly low, and we are recording a little more than a case a day. Compared to early days, it is already over. But. We are still occasionally getting a covid death reported. Our death rate was always lower than most places, per case, but we had gone months without a death, and then one popped up. A couple of months later we just got another one. Just because deaths are more rare now, doesn’t mean they can’t keep happening. To me it just makes sense to do what I can to keep from getting it, and to make it less severe if I should get it. If that means I get two shots every year instead of one, so what.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin: My recollection, admittedly fuzzy, was that the most aggressive repeat vaccination schedule under discussion was ‘one shot every six months’, so even if you got the bivalent right when it became available, you’d still have a month or two to go before being due for a booster.
Edit: and most of the discussion was centered around annual boosters, just like for the flu.
Matt McIrvin
@raven: Asimov or Wolfman Jack?
“Now this DOES NOT MEAN there is going to be a draft…”
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: Yeah, I think they’re talking about recommending an annual booster with the flu shot. The thing is, for most people that’s a huge increase in the frequency of shots they’ll get but for most of us around here it’s probably a considerable decrease.
Matt McIrvin
YES, you clowns, I follow this stuff like normal people follow sports.
dmsilev
What would be wonderful would be a combination flu+COVID vaccination. Given all the (totally unjustified) resistance to the COVID vaccines, a ‘winter respiratory disease vaccination’ might have more uptake. I think something like that is in the R&D pipeline, but not sure if it’s anywhere near deployment.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin: Now you have me inevitably thinking of a ‘fantasy COVID league’. Sorry.
Brachiator
@Suzanne:
I agree that effective and simple infographics can be a great aid.
The CDC tries to take many factors into account on their Find Out When You Need a Booster page.
But you have to restart if you have multiple kids or relatives of different ages.
James E Powell
@Brachiator:
There is widespread denial about COVID deaths, even among people who are not MAGA maniacs. For many the fall back position is, sure people died, but they were overweight, old, sick, or were going to die anyway.
CaseyL
I made an appointment for an extra booster with my pharmacy with no trouble at all. But it’s only been 4 months since the last one, so I canceled it. I’ll make another appointment in a month or so.
I’m also going on a trip in June, and want to ge sure my immunity is still sparkly
The rise in anti-vax sentiment makes me wonder how many people who used to get an annual flu shot without strife or bitching will now decide their political allegiance now precludes that.
eclare
@zhena gogolia: Same here, I wonder if I should get another one.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
Very true, but this type of denial is typically strongest among right wingers.
Also, from the beginning I have noted pundits who insist that decisions about Covid must be a matter of individual responsibility, that government has no role in telling people what to do. I think that this will be an issue in 2024.
eclare
@Suzanne: I have said since this started that Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, may be a brilliant dr, but she absolutely sucks at both messaging and understanding human behavior.
KrackenJack
@Matt McIrvin:
Our response to PSA in high school was was, “If I’m lyin’ you’re dyin'”
Suzanne
@eclare:
Yes.
The DHS stupid terror-alert-level color chart was out of order (green and blue were reversed!), but at least it “fit on a slide”. If you want lots of people to do stuff, it needs to fit on a slide. It needs to be reproducible, easily comprehensible, to hang prominently in every location of healthcare delivery. It needs to be printed in the newspaper, to go on the web, to be shown on the evening news.
At this point — and I am someone who signed up for alerts from my county and state health departments — I can’t easily find this information. I am a person who puts effort into knowing things.
The country has great design talent — use it!
Soprano2
@Brachiator: If the death rate were even 10% the attitude would be much different. The asymptomatic nature of so many Covid infections didn’t help, either.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I hate how almost every article about vaccination has a picture of someone getting a shot, sometimes while making a face. Is that really necessary?
Pittsburgh Mike
@jonas: This is frustrating. When you look at the CDC’s figures, and select my age group (65-79) for example, the Omicron+ booster greatly reduces likelihood of death, like by more than a factor of 25 compared to unvaccinated, and a factor of 3 compared to vaccinated.
So, it’s really a disservice to talk about how these variants are getting around the vaccine, when the vaccine is actually providing a great benefit — you very likely don’t die from Covid if you’re vaccinated, and keeping up to date on boosters helps even more.