VACCINES:
1) A website that is bilingual in English and Spanish offers a free service that matches up people with U.S. clinics that have leftover COVID-19 vaccines about to expire and otherwise headed for the trash, reports Katie Thomas at The New York Times (3/9/21). The site, called Dr. B, is like a stand-by list for vaccines. The site states, as of this writing, that more than 1.3 million people have signed up for the service so far. People who sign up submit their birth date, job details, any underlying health conditions etc., Thomas reports. “If vaccine providers near them have extra doses, they will get notified via text message and have 15 minutes to respond. Then they must be willing to quickly travel to the vaccination site,” the story states. Data submitted to the site is not protected by HIPAA, the federal health care privacy law, Thomas reports: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/health/covid-vaccine-leftover-doses-dr-b.html.
2) Grassroots volunteers are “springing up” across the U.S. to help older adults navigate the confusing web sites set up for COVID-19 vaccine appointments, reports Marla Broadfoot for Scientific American (3/3/21). Organized efforts are helping people in California, Kentucky and Maryland, some of which are bilingual in Spanish and in English, the story states. Some have a presence on social media, for which the story provides links: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/teens-and-other-volunteers-help-seniors-find-scarce-covid-shots/.
3) For a digestible summary of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) “guidance for fully vaccinated people,” released 3/8/21, check out the lists near the end of this 3/8/21 piece by Allison Aubrey and Rachel Treisman for NPR. The lists summarize “what fully vaccinated people can do” (including: visit indoors unmasked with other fully vaccinated people, and visit indoors and unmasked with unvaccinated people who are at low risk for severe COVID-19) as well as the precautions that fully vaccinated people should still take (including: wear a well-fitted mask and socially distance in public; avoid medium-sized and large gatherings; and wear masks, physically distance "and take other prevention measures when visiting with unvaccinated people from multiple households”): https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/03/08/974783644/cdc-says-its-safe-for-vaccinated-people-to-do-these-activities.
4) Some helpful commentary with graphic illustrations of the new CDC guidance can be found in this 3/9/21 post by Katelyn Jetelina at Your Daily Epidemiologist. Jetelina, of the University of Texas Health Science Center, writes that she is “surprised (and happy)” that the CDC now says that fully vaccinated people can safely visit indoors with unvaccinated people who have a low risk for COVID-19 without wearing masks. Why the surprise? “Because the CDC doesn’t like risk,” she writes. She interprets the recommendation as indicating that the agency “is confident that vaccinated transmission is really low.” Jetelina cites an example of this type of interaction: “fully vaccinated grandparents can visit indoors with their unvaccinated healthy daughter.” And she writes, “Can grandparents can hug healthy grandkids? YES. YES. YES”: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/cdc-guidelines-re-vaccinated.
5) And the Unbiased Science Podcast posted to Instagram a graphic illustration of the new CDC guidance for people who are fully vaccinated (3/8/21):
6) Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says that the U.S. will continue to adhere to a “two-dose strategy,” which large-scale human studies found to be effective in protecting people from severe cases of COVID-19 and death from COVID-19, reports Dan Diamond at The Washington Post (3/1/21). A handful of relatively small studies, some of which have not been reviewed by outside experts for flaws, suggest that people who recover from COVID-19 might require only one dose of two-dose vaccines (made by Pfizer/BioNTech and by Moderna) for protection against severe COVID-19. And the UK has adopted a one-dose strategy to reach more people quickly with a reduced level of protection. While Fauci says he understands the UK decision, he says it “wouldn’t make sense in American,” the story states. And he warned that shifting to a single-dose of either of the two-dose vaccines “could leave people less protected, enable variants to spread and possibly boost skepticism among Americans already hesitant to get the shots,” Diamond writes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/01/fauci-defends-two-shot-strategy/.
7) Lena H. Sun at The Washington Post asked five public health and infectious-diseases experts how their lives have and have not changed post-vaccination (3/10/21). The new normal for a University of California at San Francisco expert has included hosting a dinner part, without masks or distancing; hugging friends; and eating indoors at restaurants (where she lives, “tables were distanced, doors were open to the outside to boost ventilation and the staff were all masked,” according to the expert who made this choice, the story states). A University of Alabama at Birmingham expert interviewed for the piece says she is still not comfortable at restaurants and bar, but she went to a hair salon, and she and her partner recently hosted vaccinated friends and their two young children for dinner. A University of Maryland School of Public Health researcher says he is not going back to in-person grocery shopping, but he and his wife have resumed making routine and not-so-routine health-care appointments: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/10/vaccination-guidance-experts/.
SCIENCE:
8) This accessible summary by Michelle Crouch for AARP of what is known to date about the new coronavirus and COVID-19 boils it down to 10 established facts about the coronavirus, now that we are a year into the pandemic (3/8/21). The bullet-points include “it’s in the air,” “it’s worse than the flu — much worse,” “people with no symptoms can spread it,” and “COVID-19 is more than a respiratory disease.” The item that is intriguing to me is: “it’s not going away.” “Most experts now believe the coronavirus will never totally be eradicated,” Crouch writes. Instead, the likely outcome of vaccinating a large portion of the global population in the next two or three years is to make COVID-19 a "minor illness for most people” and allow “the vast majority” of people to return to a largely normal way of life: https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/one-year-of-covid.html.
9) For more in-depth exploration of pandemic forecasts and related speculation, see Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell’s “short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus” story for STAT (3/4/21). Yes, the standard forecast for the long-term future of COVID-19 is a seasonal illness that is nothing but a nuisance for most people who have been vaccinated or those previously exposed to SARS-CoV-2, aka SARS-2. But the end of this piece raises the specter of SARS-2 joining the ranks of influenza viruses. “While most people don’t see the flu as an existential threat, it still kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands around the world, every year,” the story states. To be honest, I avoid reading forecasts: https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/04/the-short-term-middle-term-and-long-term-future-of-the-coronavirus/.
10) Registries and research worldwide on women who tested positive for the new coronavirus while pregnant suggest that "pregnant women with COVID-19 are at a higher risk for hospitalization and severe disease” than women their age who are not pregnant, reports Nidhi Subbaraman at Nature (3/9/21). The better news is that the risks to babies are minimal — they are “mostly spared a severe respiratory infection, and do not often get sick,” Subbaraman writes. It appears that the virus only rarely crosses from the mother to the fetus. A graphic in the piece compares outcomes such as intensive-care admission and pre-term birth for pregnant women with and without COVID-19 across 77 studies. There’s still a lot left on this topic that researchers want to study more closely and figure out such as whether a mother’s immunity to the coronavirus passes to the baby: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00578-y.
11) Research to find effective COVID-19 treatments has yielded few clear winners to date (although there’s now good evidence that the steroid dexamethasone cuts COVID-19 deaths in hospitalized patients), and the “only global trial of potential COVID-19 treatments” currently is stalled and testing no drugs, reports Kai Kupferschmidt for Science (3/3/21). The story provides an overview of the impressive structure of the World Health Organization’s Solidarity trial — it allows "doctors around the world to take part, by randomizing patients to one of the study treatments,” enabling the large numbers of participants required to arrive at statistically significant results, Kupferschmidt writes. It sounds like the UK’s Recovery trial is the world’s second largest network for testing COVID-19 drugs and operates similarly. And both trials make it easy for researchers to enter data, which can encourage more participation and yield conclusive results faster. While the Recovery trial has scored some successes, the Solidarity trial currently has lost momentum and is paused, to the dismay of some researchers, the story states. And Solidarity keeps striking out, having found no significant drop in COVID-19 deaths in studies of 4 treatments: anti-viral remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, "interferon beta, and the HIV drug combination lopinavir and ritonavir,” Kupferschmidt reports (a smaller U.S. study found remdesivir cuts recovery time in hospitalized patients). The Recovery trial currently has experiments under way in more than 38,000 patients on five drugs: “aspirin; colchicine, a gout treatment; a COVID-19-targeted antibody cocktail made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; baricitinib, which treats rheumatoid arthritis; and dimethyl fumarate, a treatment for multiple slerosis,” Kupferschmidt writes. Leaders of the Solidarity trial, which should be considered a success story, per a University of Oxford epidemiologist who helped design it, recently discussed drugs it plans to test next and should emerge soon from its “doldrums,” the story states: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/international-megatrial-coronavirus-treatments-standstill.
12) Some seemingly good news came last week in a study published in JAMA Cardiology: it looks like less than 1% of pro athletes who tested positive for SARS-2 last year suffered from heart disease. “None of the athletes who participated in the study had severe” infections, writes Nicole Auerbach at The Athletic (3/4/21), but "all five athletes who had inflammatory heart disease did have symptoms.” There are a lot of caveats with this finding — almost all of the 789 athletes who were followed for several months last year were male, and the researchers did not look at previous cardiac images for the athletes to determine if the inflammation came before or after SARS-2 infections [paywall]: https://theathletic.com/news/heart-issues-rare-for-pro-athletes-who-have-had-covid-19-study-suggests/6XyDmoWRY9IF.
13) For a solid deep-dive into the latest research on what COVID-19 does to our hearts, including those of athletes, see Jennifer Abbasi’s 2/10/21 piece for JAMA: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776538.
PUBLIC HEALTH:
14) I was struck by at least one sentence in Abigail Rubel’s 3/2/21 story for the Times-Union, which explores the risk of basketball, hockey, wrestling and other sports deemed “high-risk” by the state of New York (they are classified as high-risk because they are played indoors, players come into close contact with one another). The sentence quotes Purdue University virologist David Sanders and Columbia University Medical Center epidemiologist Stephen Morse. The sentence: “The biggest risk of high-risk sports is borne not by the teens who play it, Morse and Sanders said, but by the adults around them, who are at greater risk of severe COVID-19”: https://www.timesunion.com/sports/article/How-risky-are-high-risk-sports-for-high-15990675.php.
15) This 2/26/21 AARP piece by Peter Urban and Barbar Stepko describes a variety of solutions for preventing the fogging of eyeglasses when wearing a face mask, including simply washing glasses with soap and water, leaving a film that blocks condensation. The piece also describes antifoam lens coatings, sprays and wipes, and a simple hack involving a folded tissue between your mouth and the mask. “The easiest, and least expensive, way to ensure that your glasses don’t fog is to wear a snug-fitting mask with a tight seal across the top that prevents your breath from escaping," according to a University of Maryland School of Medicine ophthalmologist, the story states: https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/prevent-foggy-glasses-face-masks.html.
ENTERTAINMENT:
16) You might enjoy watching the winners of this year’s “Dance Your Ph.D.” Contest. Sofia Moutinho reports for Science that the winning team, whose rap song and choreography explain how groups of atoms stick together to form clouds, adapted to the pandemic by shooting their videos outdoors or in empty laboratories (3/3/21): https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/watch-winners-year-s-dance-your-phd-contest.
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Love/In friendship, Robin