Tag: How Little We Know About COVID-19

Monday Wake Up Call – November 22, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, NV – November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

Today is the 58th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. While it wasn’t the first time Americans dove deep into conspiracy theories, who killed JFK has always been a controversial topic surrounded by conspiracy theories since that November day.

Over the weekend, we passed a sad milestone. The number of US Covid deaths in 2021 surpassed the deaths in 2020 and we still have a month to go. So far, there have been 385,457 deaths this year vs. 385,343 in 2020 according to the WSJ.

Wrongo has a few observations about what our continuing saga with Covid says about America. Almost 200 million of us are fully vaccinated. In addition, we have had 47 million confirmed cases to date. That means 74.8% of us have some level of antibodies to the several variants of Covid that have traveled through our population in the past two years.

But because: 1) Vaccines haven’t made it beyond the rich world (only 6% of the population in Africa is vaccinated) and 2) Americans seem to value the freedom to control their bodies over public health, new variants that may not be controllable by current vaccines could infiltrate the US.

There’s one very concerning new variant, B.1.640. It appears to be from Africa and has only been seen in small numbers. Apparently it’s bad. The Jerusalem Post mentioned it in” New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?” after it spread to Europe:

“A new COVID variant identified in a handful of European countries is raising concerns among some health professionals because there are changes to the coronavirus spike protein that have never been seen before.”

The B.1.640 variant has nothing to do with Delta. Researchers have had a really hard time placing it on the known Covid family tree, because it’s so far removed from anything else, that it just sits on a very long branch of its own. They think that it may elude our current vaccines.

If true, this would be another example of viral evolution completely blindsiding us. And if it isn’t this one, we’ll probably see some other variant.

The sad truth is that America is no longer willing to fight Covid. We think its too hard, and we don’t like doing difficult things. Too many of us don’t want to choose between public health and our economy.

Our unofficial policy is to expect that Covid will become a gradually declining annual infection. But that’s based on the assumption that we have a successful vaccine, that the current variant is all we’ll see, and that the virus will lose its potency over time.

Nobody dares say it out loud, but Covid has revealed the US to be a prime risk for a bioweapon attack.

If a terror group, or an adversary country decided to launch a biological attack, there is clearly nothing that we would do to stop it. How do we know that? Because Covid could have been a biological attack, and it was allowed to spread broadly instead of being properly dealt with. Because it was “too hard” to try to stop it.

We’ve spent countless $ trillions over the last 20 years for “national security”, and this is where we’ve gotten to? Wrongo is starting to think that Churchill’s comment that “the US will do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else” was overly optimistic.

Time to wake up America! We’ve got to toughen up, or face defeat, not only on the battlefield but in ICUs across America. To help you wake up, here’s a throwback song from another era. Listen to “I’d Love to Change the World” by the late Alvin Lee & his group, Ten Years After from their 1971 Album: “A Space In Time.”

The video doesn’t feature the band, just the song from the album. The video is a film student project that Wrongo likes. Overall, the song  looks at what were considered the biggest problems in the world in 1971: Overpopulation, economic inequality, pollution, and war. Unsurprisingly, the issues remain the same:

Sample Lyric:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

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Saturday Soother, What If It Never Goes Away? Edition – July 25, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Water Lilies – 2020 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

Happy Saturday, fellow disease vectors! Wrongo is beginning to think that COVID will be with us for a very long time, possibly forever. We seem incapable as a society of following two simple rules: Mask up, and practice social distancing. So we won’t even muster a basic defense against it.

The virus needs new hosts all the time, and if you keep potential hosts sufficiently separated from each other, it can’t spread. This isn’t unknown, and it isn’t difficult. Asian and South Pacific nations successfully implemented it.

Now even America’s denier-in-chief is tumbling to the reality that the virus will be with us for a long time. Back in March, Wrongo asked:

“What unpleasant decisions would our federal and state governments be willing to take to get us out of a deep recession, if the virus is still around a few months from now, and still killing a lot of people? Is restoring our economy, and putting Americans back to work worth a million lives lost? Is it worth 300,000?”

Well, we’re now halfway to 300k deaths, and we could lose 200,000 by Election Day. The pace of virus infections is growing, although the US COVID death rate has fallen. Having said that, we’re dying at a rate that’s 10 times faster than the Europeans.

Here’s a screenshot from CNN:

It was almost 100 days to our first million cases, and just 15 days to our fourth million! After a slowdown in the Northeast, American hospitalizations today are about the same as they were on April 15.

Politicians have largely gambled that some form of effective vaccine will be discovered, and that it will be available in large enough quantities to halt the epidemic by next year. If they’re correct, they figure that they can allow more of us to die today in order to keep the economy bumping along at least at its current stagnant pace.

In a way, they are saying that the illness and deaths of the little people are less important than the health of our current economic system. So, let’s experiment with reopenings, and play down the need to mask up. Worse, America’s checker-board response, where each state and each county takes a different approach, is perpetuating the likelihood of a bad outcome.

But, what if there is no vaccine? Who’s doing the planning for that downside risk?

Should Americans simply throw up their hands and wait to get infected? Of course not. The virus needs uninfected humans to propagate. A social system that isolates the infected from the uninfected must be instituted, along with universal quick daily testing, masking and social distancing.

If the virus is going to be around permanently, we’ll have to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the old and the young. We locked up the elderly in the petri dishes we call “senior living centers” and they died at staggering rates. We let kids stew in their homes without much chance at getting a real education.

Neither can be allowed to continue if the virus isn’t going away.

And the physical damage seems to go well beyond the lungs. A study reported in Australia covered patients sick with COVID in 69 countries across six continents. It shows that more than half of all COVID-19 patients were found to have damaged hearts. It surveyed 1216 patients, aged 52 to 71, 70% of them male, so it’s a small but troubling sample of what can happen. Ilargi asks:

“So what happens to your health care system if you let half the population catch the virus, and half of those end up with heart damage in one form or another, to one degree or another?”

Knowing all this, are you willing to go with: It’s not that bad, it’s not that deadly, and those old folks would have died anyway?

If the disease is going to be with us for a long time, do you think that kids should just go back to school? We all should get back to the office? That we should just open up the bars?

Wow, these thoughts make us need our Saturday Soother more than ever.

Here in Connecticut, we’re in for another hot dry spell. Wrongo picked our first tomatoes and jalapenos yesterday. Also, we saw a deer with three fawns, a rarity, since one or two are usual.

Let’s take a minute and open a Guji Uraga Nitro Cold Brew coffee from Denver CO’s Corvus Coffee Roasters, pour it over ice and settle back at an appropriate physical distance to contemplate just how far away COVID seems from you.

Now, listen to the late Ennio Morricone’s “Peace Notes from Cinema Paradiso”. Here Morricone directs in a 2007 live performance in Venice:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Monday Wake Up Call – April 27, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Harvest Moon over Bisti Badlands, south of Farmington, NM – 2019 photo by navidj.

Question: How many Americans have died from COVID-19? A: 54,024 as of Sunday.

Question: How many Americans died in the Vietnam War? A: 58,220.

Barring a miracle, we will pass that Vietnam milestone this week. By then, there will be more than one million confirmed cases, and 60,000 deaths in the US. Can we take a minute, and try to place the Coronavirus in the context of the dead and broken bodies from Vietnam?

Vietnam took ten years to reach that horrible number, while COVID-19 has met it in less than three months. Wrongo served during the Vietnam War. It was a trying time for all Americans. We were disunited at home, at much at war with each other, as with the Viet Cong. It scarred at least a generation, and there are still victims of both the domestic and foreign fights among us.

Today’s fight against the Coronavirus may become the current generation of 20-something’s Vietnam. Jobs won’t come back quickly, friends and family are dying, and the lack of testing and a vaccine will make life scarier for young people than for any other group.

Like Vietnam did to the boomers, Coronavirus could scar young people for years to come.

As we head into month four of the outbreak, we know that we are undercounting deaths. The Economist reported on one aspect of the undercount early in April, comparing cardiac arrest deaths in NYC to the historical average:

Are the increased rate of cardiac arrest deaths really COVID-19 deaths? A strong case can be made that they are. Back to the Economist, who says that the outbreak will be worse in the South: (emphasis and parenthesis by Wrongo)

“Places with older residents and more diabetes, heart disease and smoking have higher CFRs (case-to-fatality rates)…..Counties with lots of poor or black people tend to have more health problems, less social distancing and fewer ICU beds. Yet CFRs in such areas are even higher than you would expect from these factors alone.

Together, these variables leave a geographic footprint….the highest death rates will probably…be…in poor, rural parts of the South and Appalachia with high rates of heart disease and diabetes. Worryingly, the three states that announced plans this week to relax their lockdowns (Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina) are all in this region.”

It didn’t have to be like this. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but in the end, the single most important factor in America’s disaster of a response was the lack of early testing. That will be a greater disaster if we fail to keep growing testing as the lockdowns end.

One thing that’s difficult to comprehend is the lack of empathy for the dead and their families and friends by some Americans. Most can rouse themselves to celebrate the first responders, health care workers, and “essential” workers, but not all can.

The WaPo has analyzed all of Trump’s Coronavirus briefings, and found this:

“The president has spoken for more than 28 hours in the 35 briefings held since March 16, eating up 60% of the time that officials spoke….Over the past three weeks, the tally comes to more than 13 hours of Trump — including two hours spent on attacks and 45 minutes praising himself and his administration, but just 4½ minutes expressing condolences for coronavirus victims.”

Trump has not even ordered American flags lowered in tribute to the dead, while some governors have. New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy and New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo both did in April. As Susan B. Glasser said in the New Yorker:

“Trump, who has in the past personally asked for the flags to be lowered after a shooting or a politician’s death, can’t even bring himself to do this much for victims of the coronavirus.”

Time to wake up, America! We must tread carefully for the next few months, because we truly know very little about the virus. For example, there’s no evidence that Coronavirus antibodies prevent reinfection.

To help you wake up, listen to “Road to Nowhere” written by David Byrne for the 1985 Talking Heads album “Little Creatures”. Here, it’s performed in 2012 by David Byrne and St. Vincent, live in Paris with a brass band:

Sample Lyric:

Well, we know where we’re going
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowing
But we can’t say what we’ve seen

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Flattening the Curve May Take Time

The Daily Escape:

Dying Tornado, KS – photo by mattgphoto

When it comes to ending the lockdown, the theory is that once we’ve “flattened the curve” we can ease up on social isolation, mask-wearing and get back to work. The problem is that when we think about the downside of the curve, we think parabolas. This chart demonstrates that even with the “flattening”, we’ve been told to expect a sharp drop-off in cases:

But as Cathy O’Neil says: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The dying won’t be over nearly as soon as it [a curve like that] suggests.”

O’Neil looked at the curves for Italy and Spain. Both had uncontrolled outbreaks and climbed the curve about two weeks ahead of the US. They also turned to lockdowns late, leading to overburdened hospitals. So, they offer a decent indication of what to expect in in America:

 “Their curves…are not symmetric curves. They go up fast, flatten out and then descend slowly. How slowly? It’s still hard to tell, but the shape strongly suggests that the bad news won’t go away nearly as quickly as it arrived.”

Here’s Italy for example:

It’s too early in the virus’s growth in the US to know what the right side of our curve will look like, but the evidence from Europe suggests that the descent will be slow. More from O’Neil:

“New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said ‘the worst is over’ and ‘we’ve reached the peak.’ He should have followed with “now comes the long wait.”

She’s saying that the far side of the curve is likely to be a long, slow slog. This is food for thought for politicians who must decide when to end the lockdown.

It should also be food for thought for all of those protesting the lockdowns. In addition to the shape of the curve, we still have almost no idea what the actual prevalence of the virus is in the general population.

Abbott Labs has developed a 5 minute serology test that it says has 100% sensitivity and 99.6% specificity (Sensitivity means the test detects the presence of antibodies triggered by the COVID-19 virus; specificity means it successfully avoids mistaking that virus for similar coronaviruses).

The test was used in the Boston suburb of Chelsea. It found that of 200 randomly sampled residents who were stopped on the street and asked to give some drops of blood, 64 had antibodies. That’s 32%. The study was conducted by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital.

John Iafrate, a pathologist at Harvard and the study’s principal investigator, said:

“We don’t know at this point what percent of these antibody-positive individuals are still carrying virus, but a fair estimate is likely 30-50%.”

Soumya, a health reporter for the LA Times, tweeted: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“LA County just released the results of their antibody study. Tests found that 4.1% of the county’s population has antibodies to the coronavirus. That figure is 55 times higher than what is suggested by the official case count.”

This suggests that there are many more infected, but asymptomatic people than are in the official numbers.

So, we need to be more sensible about both the shape of the curve, and about how little we know about who has the disease, and who doesn’t.

We’re still flying almost totally blind, four months after the government found out this was coming.

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