Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I was chatting with a California Mask and Shutdown Karen. Did the recent exponential plague in California, despite its mask rituals and nearly yearlong lockdown, change his views on the efficacy of masks and shutdown for containing COVID-19? From the NYT:

It turns out that the exponential plague just underlines the importance of masks. He blamed “Latinos” for causing the California plague. On the way to his house in the hills (he paid an extra $1+ million for a house 1/2 mile from the city limit so that his children wouldn’t have to go to school with the Black and brown Americans whose interests he says that he champions), he has seen “Latinos” barbecuing outdoors without masks on.

(Readers will not be surprised to learn that I educated him regarding the use of the term Latinx.)

So we’ve made a lot of progress in convincing rich white people that humans are in charge of coronavirus. Thus, when coronavirus “spikes” it must be due to something for which humans are to blame. But it seems that rich white people are not quick to blame rich white people. For rich white Californians, the Latinx are apparently the scapegoats (and also, via delivery services, the enablers of their ever-deeper bunkering).

(This is a little like Christianity versus Greek/Roman religion. If your Roman village is destroyed you can say “well, the gods are powerful sociopaths so we should sweep up and rebuild.” If your Christian village is destroyed, you must say “God is omnipotent, benevolent, and just and therefore we did something to bring this destruction down on ourselves.” The twist with the American coronaplague is that we aren’t a unified nation so it is always easy to find another group (Trump voters, Blacks, Latinx) to blame.)

Related:

• California current COVID-19 rate more than double South Dakota’s
• Karen has COVID-19 (California current case rate surpasses South Dakota’s)
• California: Masks will stop a viral epidemic, but won’t help with smoke
• “How the Pandemic Has Been Devastating for Children From Low-Income Families” (the rich white people at the NYT let us know how much the Black community was helped by all the BLM signs on suburban lawns combined with rich white advocacy of multi-year shutdown of schools for Black children)

“A Better Way to End the Pandemic Quickly” (MedPage Today):

The current plan is to give two doses, 21 days apart for the Pfizer product and 30 days apart for Moderna’s. Alternatively, all available doses could be given immediately, doubling the number of people who could be reached. Both Pfizer and Moderna report that the efficacy of a single dose is only about 50%. But a closer look at their incidence curves suggests that immunity appears to be maximized about 14 days after the first dose. In the Moderna trial, for example, most of the cases in the vaccine arm occurred during the first 2 weeks following the initial dose. We recognize that the vaccine was developed and tested on the assumption that two doses are necessary. Yet, the trial data suggest that a single dose provides substantial immunity. During this severe pandemic, it seems reasonable to use the available supply to reach as many people as possible in the short term. Delaying the second dose would maximize limited resources and could reduce serious illness and death. A recent projection suggests the U.S. will receive 40 million doses of the two mRNA vaccines by early 2021. A rough calculation suggests that vaccinating 40 million persons with these 40 million doses versus 20 million persons with two doses each could prevent over 100,000 severe cases and save over 10,000 lives.

Despite that fact that the Moderna vaccine was developed nearly a year ago (see “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time”), testing has been so slow that we can suspect, but don’t know for sure, that one dose is sufficient!

If the MedPage Today authors (Michael H. Criqui, MD, MPH, and Robert M. Kaplan, PhD; maybe they are colleagues of Dr. Jill Biden, MD?) are correct, we are going to be wasting half of our vaccine supply by giving two doses when one is sufficient.

How might we waste half of the remaining half? By giving the vaccine to people who are already immune as a result of previous infection (nearly one third of the U.S. population had been infected as of November (NPR/CDC), which means it will be closer to 165 million by the time the vaccine is available to the average person).

[In the Department of Prescience: “Up to 150 million Americans are expected to contract the coronavirus, congressional doctor says” (March 11, 2020).]

From the World Health Organization, right now:

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.

Same URL, but the archive.org version captured in November:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven’t been infected, or in whom an infection hasn’t triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear.

It is tough to think of a time when science has progressed so quickly!

Also, in the Department of Evolution of Science, the W.H.O.’s January-June 2020 recommendation against masks for the general public:

Related:

• NYT curve of South Dakota COVID-19 cases, going up and then down despite no mask or shutdown order being issued (herd immunity without a vaccine or something else?)

Our mole in the U.S. health care system, the author of Medical School 2020, reports that his hospital ended up being supplied with way more coronavirus vaccine than needed for patient-facing clinical workers. “It doesn’t last that long, so they needed to get rid of it.” Did they take the leftovers to the local nursing homes and try to save the elderly? “No,” he responded. “They’re just giving it to anyone with a badge, even if they’re not clinical.”

Happy Christmas Eve! Here’s hoping that Santa brings you a vaccine, even if you don’t need one!

Related:

• “Does the flu vaccine work as well in elderly people?” (health.harvard.edu): The flu vaccine can be less effective in elderly adults. That’s because the flu vaccine works by priming the body’s own immune system to mount a response to the virus if it’s encountered. Older adults may have weaker immune systems, and therefore a weaker immune response to the vaccine.
• “Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” (NBC, May 15, 2020): “I think it’s possible you could see a vaccine in people’s arms next year — by the middle or end of next year [2021]. But this is unprecedented, so it’s hard to predict,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. … “A lot of optimism is swirling around a 12- to 18-month timeframe, if everything goes perfectly. We’ve never seen everything go perfectly,” [Rick] Bright said. “I still think 12-18 months is an aggressive schedule, and I think it’s going to take longer than that to do so.” Bright, an internationally recognized vaccine expert, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that he was fired for opposing the use of an unproven coronavirus treatment promoted publicly by the president. Trump has called Bright a “disgruntled” employee.

A friend here in Maskachusetts has been fairly careful to avoid COVID-19. He’s supposedly in a “bubble” with three kids, their mom, the outside nanny, and her boyfriend. He’s in a suburban fortress to which everything is delivered by an army of essential workers. Nonetheless, he began feeling unwell on December 7. On December 9, he had a PCR test, which came back negative. He and his wife both lost their senses of taste and smell, but otherwise the symptoms were milder than a typical cold. A December 14 sample tested positive. He is in his 40s and was fully recovered by December 17. The wife (30s) and kids (1-year-old twins; 3) recovered sooner. The children had mild symptoms for just a day or two (one of the 1-year-olds did test positive).

The source of the infection was traced to the nanny, a young migrant from Latin America. Perhaps her boyfriend was in a bubble with some gals from Tinder while the nanny was bubbling with the kids? Her immigration status is unclear, but “individuals detained by ICE were 13 times more likely to have COVID-19 than members of the U.S. general population in April-August 2020” (“Impact of COVID-19 on the Immigration System”).

Arranging testing here in Maskachusetts was burdensome and slow. After a couple of days to arrange a test, results took as long as four days to come back. As with roughly half of tests of folks who are infected, my friend’s first test was a false negative (probably due to his body not putting virus on the swab, not due to a mistake in the PCR process). He didn’t receive laboratory confirmation of his disease until after the end of the CDC-recommended quarantine period for the disease (i.e., Kary Mullis‘s invention wasn’t medically or epidemiologically useful).

Along with a higher rate of current COVID-19 infection than never-masked never-shut South Dakota (CDC), we also had more than a foot of snow fall on the ground prior to the official start of winter:

Where is global warming now that we need it?

Related:

• Friend in Texas runs, but cannot hide, from coronavirus