COVID-19: an Endemic Doesn't Mean "harmless"

COVID-19: an Endemic doesn't mean "harmless"

In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.

New version of omicron reported dubbed "stealth omicron"

New version of omicron reported dubbed "stealth omicron":The UK Health Agency reported cases of BA.2 have been detected in 40 countries and was first reported in the Philippines. It is the dominant form of the virus in Denmark.

Scientists say there is still much to learn about the new version. As of right now, there is “insufficient” evidence that it causes more severe illness or is more contagious than the original omicron variant.

Opinion | Omicron Is Not the Final Variant - The New York Times

Opinion | Omicron Is Not the Final Variant - The New York Times:

The world got lucky with Omicron. It’s unimaginable what would have happened if that highly contagious variant had caused disease as severe as Delta has. We may not be so lucky the next time. The world cannot afford to be so unprepared ever again.

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Zeynep Tufekci - The New York Times

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Zeynep Tufekci - The New York Times

Tufekci is so smart.  I desperately need to listen to this.

And here’s the thing, it is purely luck that this one is less severe because, contrary to popular belief, viruses don’t evolve to be milder. We gain immunity to them, for sure, as we get exposed, but they just want to transmit, they don’t care if you eventually die as long as they transmit through you.

So the fact that we got a very contagious variant that happens to be milder — and I’m not saying it’s great. I’m just saying it could have been much worse — is pure luck, evolution luck. So that’s what I think we know right now after six weeks, eight weeks, which is pretty amazing.

As nations decide to live with the virus, some disease experts warn of surrendering too soon - The Washington Post

As nations decide to live with the virus, some disease experts warn of surrendering too soon - The Washington Post:

The national strategies typically reflect elements of a country’s culture, wealth, government structure, demographics and underlying health conditions. Also geography: New Zealand has managed to record only a few dozen deaths from covid-19, one of the lowest per capita death tolls on the planet, by leveraging its isolation in the South Pacific.

Japan, Singapore and South Korea, nations with a long history of mask-wearing and aggressive measures to suppress epidemics, have managed to keep the virus largely in check without draconian lockdowns or major sacrifices to their economies.

Peru, hammered by the variants dubbed lambda and gamma before the delta and omicron waves arrived, has had the deadliest pandemic per capita, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracking site. The nations of Eastern Europe, with older populations and high vaccine skepticism, are not far behind.

As nations decide to live with the virus, some disease experts warn of surrendering too soon - The Washington Post

As nations decide to live with the virus, some disease experts warn of surrendering too soon - The Washington Post:Many nations continue to impose mask requirements, vaccination mandates and travel restrictions. But few leaders in democratic societies have the political capital to take harsh measures to suppress transmission. Even the arrival of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant did not throw the world back into winter 2021, when the paramount goal remained stopping viral spread at all costs — much less back to spring 2020, when people were told to stay home, wipe down their groceries and not touch their face.

Even officials in Australia, long a fortress nation that sought to suppress the virus at all costs, have chosen to ease some mandates in recent weeks.

Additional antibodies may protect against COVID, study shows -- ScienceDaily

Additional antibodies may protect against COVID, study shows -- ScienceDaily: "Our results indicate that non-neutralising antibodies could also provide protection. This would mean that we have broader protection from antibodies than previously thought, making us less vulnerable to mutations of the virus. It warrants further investigation," says Pontus Nordenfelt who led the study and is a researcher at Lund University. In its efforts to produce vaccines and treatments, the research community has focused on neutralising antibodies, which prevent the spike protein of the virus from binding to the surface protein on our cells. In a large project led by researchers at Lund University, a more detailed study has been carried out on how the immune system also fights off the virus by means of phagocytosis, the ability to ingest foreign particles, in Covid-19 patients.

You're not doomed to get Omicron - by Erin Kissane

You're not doomed to get Omicron - by Erin Kissane:The data so far shows that Omicron outbreaks spike extremely quickly and then burn through and start subsiding. The risk of transmission is high during outbreak peaks, but people with boosters (and those with recently completed two-shot mRNA series) stand quite a good chance of avoiding Omicron infection, especially if they’re able to wear N95 or equivalent masks, maintain good ventilation, and cut out non-essential activities for a few weeks.

If you can do that for just a few weeks while Omicron blows through your area, your individual risk will start to decline. And at the same time, hospitals will start getting breathing room back, so if someone in your family does happen to get sick enough to need an IV or oxygen, they’ll be able to get it. (And I say this a lot, but if your area is experiencing an Omicron surge, this is a great time to drive carefully and postpone risky activities.)

Pfizer CEO says two Covid vaccine doses aren't 'enough for omicron'

Pfizer CEO says two Covid vaccine doses aren't 'enough for omicron': Real-world data from the United Kingdom has found that two vaccine doses are 52% effective at preventing hospitalization 25 weeks after receiving the second shot, according to data from the U.K. Health Security Agency.

Covid-19 Variant Deltacron Is Real, Scientist Says - Bloomberg

Covid-19 Variant Deltacron Is Real, Scientist Says - Bloomberg: 

So I don't know if this is just fear mongering or a real problem but if we get the infection rate of Omicron and the severity of the Delta variant, then millions will quickly die, many of them outside of a collapsed health care system.  We're talking bodies in the streets.

Deltacron infection is higher among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 than among non-hospitalized patients, so that rules out the contamination hypothesis, said Kostrikis, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus and head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Molecular Virology.

What’s more, the samples were processed in multiple sequencing procedures in more than one country. And at least one sequence from Israel deposited in a global database exhibits genetic characteristics of deltacron, he said.

“These findings refute the undocumented statements that deltacron is a result of a technical error,” Kostrikis said.

Omicron could be ‘first ray of light’ towards living with Covid

:“The thing that might happen in the future is you may see the emergence of a new variant that is less severe, and ultimately, in the long term, what happens is Covid becomes endemic and you have a less severe version. It’s very similar to the common cold that we’ve lived with for many years,” he told Times Radio on Saturday.

What makes omicron spread so quickly? A new study offers a tantalizing clue : Goats and Soda : NPR

What makes omicron spread so quickly? A new study offers a tantalizing clue : Goats and Soda : NPR: The omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant does, scientists at the University of Hong Kong report. The variant also reaches higher levels in the tissue, compared with delta, 48 hours after infection. "That's amazing," says immunologist Wilfredo Garcia-Beltran, who's a fellow at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital and wasn't involved in the study. This finding indicates that mutations in omicron have sped up the process of entering or replicating (or both) inside the tissue.

Boosted? Got Omicron? You Still Might Not Be 'Super' Immune - The Atlantic

You really don't want to get Omicron, but avoiding it seems almost impossible.

Boosted? Got Omicron? You Still Might Not Be 'Super' Immune - The Atlantic

The problem, though, is that none of this is assured, especially when factoring in the thorny variable of time. Viruses that linger too long in the body could exact a punishing cost—transmission, disease, death. But if they’re cleared out too fast, they might not have enough time to teach the body something new. And those dynamics depend partly on when someone got their last immunological boost. Someone who’s very recently received a vaccine, for instance, might still be flush with antibodies that could swiftly sweep out the virus. Ellebedy, who was exposed to his COVID-sickened wife about a month after boosting and had pretty minor symptoms, thinks that’s what happened to him, which is great from a disease-severity standpoint, and potentially a transmission one. But a truncated infection might also cut short the immune system’s review session on the virus itself. Bodies will sometimes try to calibrate their defense to match the opponent’s offense, and trifling infections aren’t always worth a massive reinvestment in protection. A later encounter with the virus might spur cells to react more dramatically and squirrel away another slew of safeguards—but at the risk of a longer, more dangerous, and more contagious infection.

Good night, sweet prince

 I'm going to shut this blog down on January 27th, before the domain renews.  I think it will still exist at http://supermutantvirus.blogspot.com

It was basically an experiment in running a blog with its own domain name, and a way to bookmark information about the virus mutations.  The Google newsfeed, unless you live in crazytown, does a pretty good job of this already.

Thanks to the four people who visited this site!