— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) March 21, 2023
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is close to making a decision on authorization of a second dose of updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters for high-risk people, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources.
FDA officials could make the decision within a few weeks, the WSJ said, adding that the regulator is considering authorizing second jabs of Omicron-targeted shots for people who are 65 years and older or those who have weakened immune systems, although officials are yet to reach a final decision.
The agency continues to closely monitor the emerging data in the United States and globally, and that data will dictate any decision on additional updated boosters, the FDA said in a statement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have to recommend the shots after the FDA authorizes the second Omicron-tailored boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna for them to become widely available.
The decision comes at a time when the FDA plans to shift to an annual COVID booster campaign with an updated strain, similar to the way Americans get their flu shots…
Updated boosters have helped prevent symptomatic infections against the new XBB-related subvariants, according to data released by the CDC in January.
The FDA authorized the so-called bivalent COVID boosters in August that target the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, along with the original strain of the coronavirus. Rollout of the updated boosters in the United States started the following month.
As of March 15, around 54 million bivalent vaccine doses were administered, accounting for 16.4% of the U.S. population, according to government data.
Well worth reading / sharing:
US officials are weighing whether to offer people who are at high risk of severe Covid-19 the chance to get another bivalent booster, according to a source familiar with the deliberations https://t.co/uCA2ZSKX0g
— CNN (@CNN) March 21, 2023
In order for XBB.1.16 (or any other new variant) to make a big change to case rates, it will not only need a transmission advantage, it will likely need to drastically increase the susceptible pool via a significant jump in immune escape.
— JWeiland (@JPWeiland) March 17, 2023
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For all the good it will do…
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(Unpaywalled gift link)
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Canada, Singapore, and Israel are among the countries that did best responding to Covid, with death rates much lower than the U.S. They all followed a similar pattern, using masking and selective closures to limit spread and then vaccinating widely. pic.twitter.com/DOr2UksDeR
— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) March 21, 2023
Big picture, how did we do in the Covid pandemic? 20 million people died. Twice as many would have died without public health action. Half as many would have died if that action had been more effective. https://t.co/ilHcW4vheR
— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) March 18, 2023
Instead of a coherent and cohesive global response, #COVID19 has been marked by a chaotic patchwork of responses. This is why we need the #PandemicAccord – that countries are now negotiating – to work in cooperation with each other to prepare for and respond to future pandemics. pic.twitter.com/IJYbsHQQQk
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) March 17, 2023
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The official trailer for the new movie “Bheed” about COVID lockdown in India has been censored and removed from YouTube for being too realistic in its portrayal of the effects of lockdown on India’s poor.pic.twitter.com/86yCo6JBsA
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) March 21, 2023
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#SARSCoV2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination w/ Pfizer's #Covid vax, suggesting the need for a post-infection booster. Study led by Stanford Univ's Institute for Immunity, Transplantation & Infection https://t.co/TPKFP2UfBt
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) March 21, 2023
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#LongCovid now looks like a neurological disorder, helping doctors to focus treatments. The causes of #LongCovid which disables millions, may come together in the brain & nervous system https://t.co/YbTrhQTIFC
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) March 18, 2023
*clotting* (not clothing) events:
A randomized trial of a blood thinner after severe Covid to prevent clothing events. Summary of result: "highly compatible with estimates of efficacy ranging from a 56% reduction to a 95% increase risk of apixiban compared with placebohttps://t.co/SqsS7OCwKq @AnnalsofIM pic.twitter.com/mZCcbXwKBf
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) March 20, 2023
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In the next pandemic, North Dakota can't make residents wear masks.
Ohio health officials can't shutter businesses.
The president can't force a vaccine or test mandate.
Inside the 3 year culmination of public health handcuffing w/ @JoelAchenbach https://t.co/OjjJzQMzKx
— Lauren Weber (@LaurenWeberHP) March 8, 2023
Zoonotic origin is always the threat. 100+ years ago the 1918/19 H1N1 flu killed 50 million…there were no A380s & 4x less people on earth. The 1st flu virus was found in pigs in 1930. Lab Leak or Not? How Politics Shaped the Battle Over Covid’s Origin https://t.co/uBInSvdfoP
— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) March 20, 2023
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Me at the airport with my N95 because f*** COVID! https://t.co/IyAFNshHci pic.twitter.com/tsmaHjhTsR
— Elon Musk (parody) (@HackingButLegal) March 17, 2023
The pressure on influencers to confirm that Covid-is-over in their content is huge. I honestly don't think it's even possible to run a COVID-aware multi-million-follower Fitness/Travel/STEM account at this point. People see a mask they just click off the page…
— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) March 18, 2023
my idiot dude, if you’re sitting that far back with me on the plane, i know you don’t have the ten grand to pay up. https://t.co/NliNV68Kbo
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) March 8, 2023
– On The Road – BigJimSlade – Hiking in the Alps, Chamonix and Grindelwald 2022, Männlichen – Wengen, part 1Reader Interactions
68Comments
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NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
63 new cases on 03/15/23.
64 new cases on 03/16/23.
68 new cases on 03/17/23.
70 new cases on 03/18/23.
73 new cases on 03/19/23.
52 new cases on 03/20/23.
36 new cases on 03/21/23.
Deaths now at 2214, up 8 since last week.
Hospital beds: we’re at 3% available now, including 17 ICU beds among 4 hospitals. The largest hospital still has no regular available beds, and just 3 available ICU beds now.
Matt McIrvin
The COVID situation continues to quiet down around here; I think the XBB.1.5 wave got nearly all of the last remaining people who’d dodged COVID for the past 3 years, but I’m also looking at the CDC’s variant charts and wondering if the appearance of XBB.1.5.1 is going to cause another wave. Currently it’s a small fraction of an already small number of cases.
NeenerNeener
I’m 65 and immune-compromised and the pharmacist at Target wouldn’t give me another bi-valent booster 3 weeks ago. Hurry up and make it official, CDC!
Amir Khalid
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health reported 270 new Covid-19 cases on 18th March, for a cumulative reported total of 5,047,070 cases. 267 of these new cases were local infections; three new cases were imported. It also reported no deaths, for an adjusted cumulative total of 36,972 deaths – 0.73% of the cumulative reported total, 0.73% of resolved cases.
9,851 Covid-19 tests were conducted on 17th March, with a positivity rate of 2.2%.
There were 9,657 active cases on 18th March, 35 more than the day before. 397 were in hospital. Eight confirmed cases were in ICU; of these patients, four confirmed cases were on ventilators. Meanwhile, 235 patients recovered, for a cumulative total of 5,000,411 patients recovered – 99.1% of the cumulative reported total.
The National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) administered 483 doses of vaccine on 21st March: 25 first doses, 44 second doses, 201 first booster doses, and 213 second booster doses. The cumulative total is 72,812,282 doses administered: 28,132,181 first doses, 27,544,712 second doses, 16,319,933 first booster doses, and 815,456 second booster doses. 86.1% of the population have received their first dose, 84.3% their second dose, 50.0% their first booster dose, and 2.5% their second booster dose.
Lapassionara
Thank you, AL. Your COVID posts are the best source of information for me. And good news about a possible next booster.
New Deal democrat
The third spring respite in a row is continuing.
Biobot updated Monday to show 359 particles per mL, down from 384 one week ago, and the lowest in 20 months except for 2 months last spring. There was a slight increase in the Midwest, but all other regions have continued to decline.
Confirmed cases (which are now only worthwhile for the general trend, not their level) were down to 23,500 as of March 14, their lowest since summer 2021. Hospitalizations as of March 19 had declined to 18,600. Only 45 days last spring and 45 days at mid year 2021 were lower. The 7 day average of deaths as of March 20 was 243, near the low end of the range for the past year, and lower than any other time except for July 2021.
The CDC’s variant update last Friday showed that XBB and it’s subvariants still comprised 95% of all cases, with no new variant making an appearance.
Until a new variant shows up, we are probably going to continue to have very low levels of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NeenerNeener: The pharmacist wouldn’t give us a second bi-valent shot either. It’s been 6 months since our first one; we’re both in our 70s; and we’re leaving on Sunday to fly to Chile to get on a cruise ship. I think it’s too late for us now, no matter what the CDC decides
Bruce K in ATH-GR
AL, I think that if you did nothing else with your life, the information you’ve provided here on the pandemic would be enough to justify your existence all on its own. We’ll never know for sure, but I’m fairly confident that you’ve saved lives.
As for me – my last shot was a Pfizer BA45 on October 6. According to the Greek government’s vaccination web site, the Immunization Committee recommends that I schedule a booster dose – although it thinks I’ve had only three shots, not five (my first two shots were in the US and not recorded here in Greece). I may get the booster next month.
Baud
If you guys need a second bivalent booster, I know a guy who can hook you up.
You can get my burner phone number from WaaterGirl.
LiminalOwl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: CVS forbids a second booster shot (yes, six months for mine too), but at least I’m not going anywhere. And working all-remote again.
Nitpick alert: Eric Topol needs to improve his proofreading, I suspect..
CCL
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Agree, AL has sainthood stars. I am thoroughly convinced that AL saved our lives.
lowtechcyclist
There have been about 144,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. in the past year, according to Worldometer.
By this time last year, the effects of the 2021-2022 winter wave had all but disappeared, so that, in my thinking, is the new normal: still killing between 3.5 and 4 times as many Americans as motor vehicles do.
Two years ago, as vaccines finally became widely available and Covid death rate dropped, I jokingly said I’d stop masking when we were losing fewer people to Covid than to car crashes. Guess the mask stays.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: I don’t know if you do podcasts, but the How I Built This podcast did an episode about the founders of Biobot. I thought it was cool that it was two women! Every year when I go to the MWEA/AWWA joint conference at the end of March I see more and more women there. I keep complaining that they need more female-centric stuff in their silent auction.
Soprano2
@CCL: I know that I made better decisions because of these Covid threads, and I knew what was happening with it and what was coming far ahead of most of the people I know. These threads have been an invaluable source of information for me. It will always be easy for me to remember when things shut down around here, because it was St. Patrick’s Day – we had to close the bar at midnight. That’s the second biggest “bar holiday” of the year after New Year’s Eve!
Matt McIrvin
@NeenerNeener: Hell, I’d really like to get one too, but it sounds like the plan is that I get no booster until the fall, and it frustrates me a bit that the real reason for that is probably an attempt to mollify conspiracy theorists (or just fool pundits who are trying to split the difference between science and conspiracy theorists) rather than anything medically well-motivated.
La Nonna
Due to our ages, 70+, we have both received 5 vaccinations in toto, 2 Astra zeneca, 1 Moderna, 1 PfizerBiontech, 1 bivalent (now almost 6 months ago). We can have another bivalent if we wish 120 days after the last one, and I think we will have it as we will be traveling to Greece and Turkey at the end of April. Rural Italy doing a good job of keeping vaccines free and available.
Matt McIrvin
I am seriously concerned that the consensus historical picture of the pandemic, or at least the consensus hindsight of the general public, is going to end up built on lies–what “everybody knows” will be that COVID escaped from a Chinese bioweapons lab, it wasn’t a big deal and we massively overreacted, the vaccines were harmful and pushed for nefarious reasons, the real crime was that everyone had to wear a mask, etc. People often talk about what history or future generations will say but I never have any faith that that will even be correct.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: We’re working hard to get that car crash rate up so you can take your mask off.
Ohio Mom
Yup, every few months I have another doctor visit of one kind or another (check-ups with specialists) and everyone of them shrugs their shoulders when asked if and when I should get another booster, and adds, “They haven’t decided/said anything yet.”
I love that unspecified “they,” it’s said with a certain amount of hostility. My doctors are as impatient and frustrated as the rest of us.
In related news, my 91 y.o. and frail MIL just finished with her first case of Covid and it wasn’t any worse than a typical head cold for her. So yeah for vaccines and boosters.
dmsilev
Locally, things are getting better. LA County hospitalizations are down to 456, a drop of about 30% compared to two weeks ago. The hospitalization number had plateaued for a while in late Feb/early Mar, but now it’s dropping quite steadily. The peak this winter was at about 1200, roughly 1/3 of the Omicron peak last year.
My employer has, as of last week, stopped its surveillance testing program. 2.5 years of spitting into little cups…
Another Scott
@NeenerNeener: My J only had the original 2 shots (she apparently had a reaction to them). I got every booster available. We finally got infected last week – she tested positive on Sunday the 12th, me on Tuesday the 14th. Our course of illness has been similar – 1-2 degree fever and elevated heart rate (105-115 for me) for about 2.5 days, lots of sinus drainage, then slow return to normal. Of course, we got secondary sinus infections from all the mucus (10 day course of antibiotics) and we’re not 100% yet.
Maybe I’ll be back at work tomorrow.
tl;dr – at least for us fairly healthy early 60s folks, Omicron just needed the primary vaccines for decent protection. I still want every available booster though – I hate getting sick!
Stay safe and mask in enclosed spaces – it’s not over yet.
Cheers,
Scott.
New Deal democrat
@Soprano2: Thanks for the information.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: My concern is that the typical experience of getting a mild case of COVID while vaccinated and recovering from it is making people underestimate the long COVID risk, kind of as if you played Russian roulette and got an empty chamber the first time. It doesn’t mean you’ll always win.
And I’m not sure the CDC’s recommendations are taking this entirely into account either. But, yes, I’m not an expert and they are.
Manyakitty
Joining the appreciation chorus. Also can’t wait for my next booster, hope it’s before fall.
Lapassionara
@LiminalOwl: Heh. I’ve heard Twitter doesn’t allow edits. But I found this amusing.
gene108
Tested positive for COVID on Monday. Getting slightly better, but still running a fever and I have soar throat that got better yesterday but is worse today. The body ache from Monday is gone.
This is my first time testing positive for COVID. I really wish it’d go away faster.
NotMax
@Lapassionara
The Baud vaccine is the intelligentsia’s choice for preventing clothing events.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: i think that there are a few things going on with the CDC and their recommendations:
1) They don’t have a director because the position has been so demonized by the monsters and qualified people are noping out.
2) Congress hasn’t provided funding for another round of boosters, free tests, etc.
3) Long COVID is probably a function of how well the body actually fully clears the virus. (My guess.). That seems to depend on lots of things that they don’t understand yet, and yet more boosters might not (or might!) help. Masking to keep the viral load down should help, at least some. Nasal vaccines were supposed to help. New antivirals were supposed to help.
We have to vote the monsters out, and crank up the science.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Is that her Amsterdam address?
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: My impression is that “long COVID” is a whole raft of different things: physical tissue damage from the infection, mis-aimed autoimmune responses, and reservoirs of live virus remaining in the body. Those were all plausible hypotheses for what was going on and it seems like they’re ALL going on in different combinations in different people. It’s a big mess.
Of course, look into this and you quickly find a lot of very panicky and scary writing that is kind of the flip side of antivaxxer material, some of which makes it sound like we’re in a slow-moving zombie apocalypse. But I do hope we come up with better-working ways to attack infection at the source rather than just mitigating severe effects.
Manyakitty
@Another Scott: what happened to Dr. Wolensky? Did the morons drive her away?
NotMax
10 a.m. blog time and no morning thread in sight.
That’s what comes of not ordering pixels in the giant economy pack.
;)
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Haha. Secret codename.
Amir Khalid
Dianna Cowern’s science YouTube channel The Physics Girl is familiar to me, and I was quite sad to learn a few weeks ago that she was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome brought on by long Covid.
Soprano2
@NotMax: Maybe the hamsters are tired from the breaking news thread late last night.
Redshift
@LiminalOwl:
In my experience, no matter how hard you try at proofreading, the more popular a tweet, the more likely it is to have a major typo.
Redshift
@NotMax:
They did, we just used up a whole one on the late night thread!
CaseyL
I’m not sure comparing Covid deaths to car crashes is on point for statistical analyses.
I think comparing Covid deaths to other diseases would be more useful. How do Covid deaths compare to, say, heart attacks? And Long Covid, which will be another chronic condition going forward, how does it compare to heart disease and cancer?
Or should Long Covid’s effects be broken down into their types? Long Covid affects the heart, the brain, the lungs.
When we talk about heart disease, it’s an umbrella term for many different conditions, and statistically we don’t footnote each one based on what caused the congestive heart failure, or afib, or faulty valves, and so on. We just say “heart disease.”
So will Long Covid just be Long Covid? Or will it swell the incidence of “heart disease, “COPD,” and “dementia”?
CindyH
Just want to thank you for these invaluable posts!
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Kieran Healy did a breakdown of excess-death stats over 2020 that demonstrated pretty conclusively that a lot of COVID deaths were being recorded as heart disease, circulatory diseases and diabetes. There were excess-death waves for all of these that exactly followed the pattern of COVID infections.
I’d love to see a followup on that for 2021 and 2022.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
What are friends for, right? ;-)
Redshift
@Matt McIrvin:
Okay, here’s the thing I still don’t get. I thought we were told there isn’t long-lasting immunity to covid, and resistance from both vaccines and infections wanes in a matter of months. So how does it matter to the severity of waves if some people had covid more than a year ago?
It seems we have more population immunity somehow, but I can’t square these things. Anyone know of a source that explains it?
Another Scott
@Manyakitty: Whoops. Thanks for the pushback.
Walensky is still there.
I was thinking of NIH – there’s no director to replace Collins yet (from January 18).
Fauci’s deputy is acting head at NIAID. Tabak is acting at NIH.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@gene108: I’m sorry to hear that. Hoping for a quick turnaround for you.
lowtechcyclist
@CaseyL:
Speaking as a professional statistician (for another 9 months, anyway, but who’s counting?), that wasn’t a statistical analysis. That was just me giving a personal opinion.
Another Scott
@Redshift: Bodies are complicated. The 4 human coronaviruses are complicated. People can and do get infected multiple times with COVID, and like any coronavirus there is no permanent immunity after infection.
The body’s defenses are multi-layered and have different time constants.
This STATNews.com article from 2020 still seems pretty good.
[eta:] – Also, the virus is changing frequently. Omicron is more infectious than the original strain, but not as deadly. So, it’s easier to get sick, but the illness usually isn’t as severe.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Cermet
I see that when I told people here two years ago that aspirin could prevent many types of after infection covid problems – i.e. organ damage, possibly long covid, it has been finally validated by a ‘gold’ study. Of course i only read/obtained this info from a med paper from an MD in NY that observed this fact. And of course, the med community ignore this MD (at a time there was no treatments or vaccine) because no ‘gold std’ study had been performed yet (like aspirin is an issue for a few days.) So now one such study has performed and of course, promotes an expense blood thinner. While I tend to not bother to read or post here anymore, seeing this made me smile.
Manyakitty
@Another Scott: fair enough. I’m still alarmed at the loss of Collins and Fauci, anyway. Over a century of knowledge and experience between the two.
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: There are different kinds of immunity and some last longer than others. My inexpert understanding is this:
What wanes over a few months is antibodies in the blood. Those are molecules that gum up the operation of the virus and also mark them for killing. 6 months after a shot or an infection, the antibodies are basically gone. High levels of antibodies can result in your clearing an infection before it’s even detectable, but they go away.
What lasts much longer is the body’s ability to ramp up a new defense rapidly, producing a new batch of antibodies and getting the T cells hunting the virus, when presented with the antigen again. That may even improve after several months because there’s a kind of accelerated evolution of B cells that happens in the bone marrow. That’s why multi-injection courses of vaccination can actually be more effective if you space them out longer.
Matt McIrvin
…And, of course, the virus itself also evolves to acquire immune escape in people whose immune systems were tuned to previous variants. So that is another factor in waning protection.
Between all of these things, the public will be susceptible to a new wave that happens several months after the previous one–but it’s not the same thing as a completely immunologically naive population. We will never have that again.
People often talk about infectious diseases evolving to be less dangerous and I get the impression that that really isn’t the main mechanism; the main mechanism is the people’s immune systems evolving to make them less dangerous. We’re already at the point where a large fraction of first COVID infections are being encountered by children, as babies or toddlers. That’s going to change the whole profile of how bodies respond to COVID.
Peale
@LiminalOwl: We need to reduce the risk of clothing!
StringOnAStick
@Matt McIrvin: Well written and logically sound based on my admittedly old coursework on the immune system. Not clickbaity enough though, so you won’t see that information published in normie media.
Matt McIrvin
@StringOnAStick: I learned most of it by following scientists on social media, particularly chise on Twitter (a COVID vaccine researcher, worked for Moderna I think).
glc
Also over 65, and traveling in May. I did not expect to be hearing much more on the topic of boosters till the fall, and I’ll be very interested in how that plays out.
Always grateful to the full-service blog!
dnfree
I was just telling my husband about some of these articles today, and I mentioned the heroic effort put in assembling them for three years now. This has been my main source of information on Covid and I often felt I had learned things sooner than most people. Thank you more than words can express for the information throughout a scary time.
SomeRandomGuy
@Matt McIrvin: The term you were looking for is, I believe, “neutralizing antibodies,” and they’re proteins that fit the spike protein of Covid-19. Once the spike is blocked, no infection is possible.
Your body doesn’t waste proteins, so it doesn’t create neutralizing antibodies forever – eventually, it “decides” the threat is over and stops making new ones. It remembers the old ones, so upon infection, new neutralizing antibodies will quickly flood your system – this is why vaccines prevented severe Covid-19 in many cases.
Now: respiratory viruses becoming less dangerous via evolution, that’s a weird thing. We had other respiratory infections, and they were very deadly, but they were able to be isolated, and the viruses died out. A virus that’s too deadly won’t reach as many victims as one that is less deadly – a less deadly variant has more living victims to spread it.
Covid-19 seems to have hit a sweet spot between rapid spread, and “just enough” deadliness to build up a humongous body count.
As another person mentioned, you also have other defenses – your body is a “defense in depth” machine. Still, from what I’ve gleaned, I *believe* that only neutralizing antibodies prevent that initial infection.
kindness
Dana Houle spouts like it’s the CDC’s fault his wife and son got Covid. Wtf dude! The CDC didn’t spray them with it to get it. They got it from someone but not the government. Getting the vaccine means less chance of getting Covid and if you do get it, you get it less seriously than if you have not been vaccinated. I’m hoping that helps Dana’s family. Sure would be nice if he mentioned that though.
Matt McIrvin
@SomeRandomGuy: I think that COVID’s fatality rate is already low enough that there’s not a lot of evolutionary pressure for it to get less deadly than it is now. The deaths aren’t inhibiting transmission at all.
My impression is that the apparently lower lethality of Omicron, relative to previous variants, was more a function of the population having preexisting infections or vaccinations than anything inherent to the virus–and since it infected so many people, it ended up causing a huge wave of deaths anyway.
SomeRandomGuy
Oh, we could only wish. CFS also looks neurological… but that doesn’t mean there are more effective treatments available from a neurologist.
I also suspect that part of the problem might be that folks think “neurological” means there’s a problem with the brain and nervous system… but sometimes, I think the body is doing something that confuses, or overwhelms, the brain and nervous system. That causes neurological symptoms, but the problem isn’t “in” the brain and nervous system.
Put another way, I’m forced to admit chiropractors might be doing more good than I thought, but I’ll still always remember the chiro who said a child with allergies and ADHD was “definitely subluxated” *without examining the child*.
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: There’s been a lot of people blaming the government for not instituting draconian zero-COVID policies, and obviously Trump did a lot of damage to mitigation efforts in 2020 by personal example and rhetoric… but I cannot imagine a world in which the US instituted lockdowns as hard as the ones they had in Spain and Italy, let alone China, regardless of how liberal its administration is.
SomeRandomGuy
@Matt McIrvin: I have no basis to argue with you; I’m not trying to imply that Covid-19 got less deadly due to evolution.You could be right about how baseline immunity has helped, and the virus is still just as deadly to people with no exposure or vaccination.
I just wanted to share a cool idea about evolution, and how it might show especially weird effects in things like viruses.
FledtheUS
A good article on the scientific evidence for the natural spillover theory:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/heres-the-full-analysis-of-newly-uncovered-genetic-data-on-covids-origins/
rikyrah
@Lapassionara:
Always have to concur.
AL has saved lives.
Hob
@kindness: My reading of Houle’s post wasn’t that he thinks it’s the CDC’s fault they got COVID, but that the current lack of clarity as to whether more boosters will be recommended or available is a bit frustrating, and that it’s (understandably IMO) more frustrating if one gets COVID in the meantime and will never know if a booster would’ve helped.
Hob
And I suspect that if I get COVID in the near future, after having dodged it all this time (as far as I’m aware; I tend to think I would be unlikely to have an asymptomatic case because respiratory viruses normally hit me pretty badly, but who knows), I would feel similarly to Houle. My experience may have been largely luck but I can’t help feeling that getting all the vaccinations I was able to get probably made a difference, and if the current indecisiveness on further boosters is being driven by political concerns more than clinical ones (as I think it is, but again, who knows), that’s frustrating. If there were a clear consensus that a further booster isn’t worthwhile, and if there weren’t so much blatant “fuck it, there’s no problem” behavior coming at me from all around, I would feel differently.
Chris T.
@SomeRandomGuy:
Something else that matters (perhaps a lot) here is that there are simply so many humans now that it’s safe to kill off a few hundred million here or there each year, as that doesn’t reduce the available host population significantly.
(This was not the case a mere hundred years ago: back then, killing 200-300 million humans reduced the human-density noticeably, i.e., 10 to 15%.)
J R in WV
@NeenerNeener:
A pharmacist wouldn’t give you a bi-valent booster a couple of weeks ago? I got my second bi-valent booster early this afternoon. All our previous vaccinations were at (first) two at a county clinic, the only health care in our rural county, (second, the boosters) at the county health dept of a next door county, the state capital.
Today I called the pharmacy where we do all our prescription business, spoke with a great guy who has been helpful with me for years now, scheduled the shot, took maybe 10 minutes, a little paperwork. Didn’t ask anything other than “You haven’t had a Covid shot recently. have you?” Nope, was last fall…
Hoping tonight I don’t have major impacts… last Moderna I slept 18 hours that night AND the next night. No harm done, just lots of really good sleep!
LiminalOwl
@Lapassionara: yes, that’s what I had just seen when I made the comment.
@NotMax: LOL.