VACCINES:
1) A 2/27/21 post by by Your Local Epidemiologist's Katelyn Jetelina, at University of Texas Health Science Center, counters misinformation that apparently went viral on what does and does not change for you once you get vaccinated for COVID-19 (2/27/21). The post ends with a quick summary: “The COVID-19 vaccine…does give immunity, does eliminate the virus, does prevent death, does not guarantee you won’t get it” (but if you do, “it will certainly be more mild”). The vaccine “does stop you from passing it on (about 70 percent of the time), does eliminate the need for travel bans (eventually), does eliminate the need for business closures (eventually)…does eliminate the need for masking (eventually)”: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/if-i-get-vaccinated.
2) For more nuance on this post-vaccination subject, check out Rachel Gutman’s 2/25/21 piece at The Atlantic, which basically says you can loosen up a little, but play it safe and don’t rush back to restaurants and large gatherings. The story states that Saskia Popescu of George Mason University advises people to keep track of the number of new daily cases per 100,000 people in their area and the local positivity rate (rate at which people test positive for the virus), among other statistics. Look for just one or two new daily cases per 100,000 people and for positivity rates at or below 2 percent, the story suggests. “Plenty of public-health experts have argued that vaccinated people safely seeing relatives or returning to the office can benefit everyone,” for its persuasive effect on the non-vaccinated, the story states. But vaccinated people should make sure not to take risks that put unvaccinated people in danger. Grandparents can hug their grandchildren but ask to wear masks during hugs, to meet outdoors,or to avoid sleeping over, the story suggests. “A vaccinated oncologist who lives with her immunocompromised sister is going to behave differently from a vaccinated retiree who lives alone,” the story states: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/02/covid-19-vaccine-golden-rule/618140/.
3) Among the strong points in freelance journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer's essay for Medium’s Elemental (2/22/21) is an exploration of various scenarios for people to think about when visiting with seniors and grandparents who have been vaccinated. Yes, it’s safe to visit vaccinated grandparents, a University of Oxford population health researcher is described as saying. Even if vaccinated seniors get infected by visitors, they probably would not get serious COVID-19, the story suggests, although seniors in their 90s are less protected by the vaccine than are seniors in their 70s. Visitors in their 50s and early 60s who are not yet vaccinated should take precautions not to get inadvertently infected by vaccinated seniors, the story suggests — spend time outdoors, especially while eating, and keep indoor spaces strongly ventilated, a Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security immunologists suggests in the story. Also, lay low before visits to minimize exposures to the virus prior to a visit, the piece suggests. If seniors live in a nursing home, be as careful as you were before people were vaccinated, the story describes an infectious diseases physician at George Washington University as saying. The piece also explores the questions of traveling if vaccinated and of spending time indoors without masks with unvaccinated friends: https://elemental.medium.com/okay-im-vaccinated-can-i-do-all-the-things-6b12946ba3fe.
4) University of Texas Health Science Center epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina also has updated her COVID-19 vaccine information chart, with a note acknowledging the desire to compare efficacy rates of symptomatic infection (getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and feeling sick from it) across the various vaccines, but advising against it. “It’s like comparing apples to oranges,” she writes, using an analogy that’s now popular on this topic. “They are very different trials [experiments]. Instead, I urge you to compare the rates for severe COVID-19 (disease, hospitalizations, and deaths). This is the important stuff.” Jetelina also explains some important context for figures indicating each vaccines’ efficacy against the variant first identified in South Africa - B.1.351. These figures derive from Petri dish studies of antibodies, not from experiments with people, and "the number of neutralizing antibody does NOT easily translate to efficacy,” she writes: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/vaccine-table-update-feb-28-2021.
5) A 2/11/21 piece at LiveScience by freelance writer Anna Nowogrodzki tackles the question of what 95% efficacy actually means. “It doesn’t mean 5% of vaccinated people get infected,” per the story’s sub-headline. The percentage of people in the large-scale Pfizer and Moderna vaccine studies who got COVID-19 was “about a hundred times less than that: 0.04%.” So, the 95% efficacy figure pertains to each vaccinated individual’s risk of getting COVID-19 compared with people in the study who did not get the vaccine. “In other words, vaccinated people in the Pfizer clinical trial were 20 times less likely than the control group to get COVID-19,” Nowogrodzki writes. Vaccines with 95% efficacy are some of the most effective vaccines available for any disease, a quoted statement from a virologist at Drew University suggests. A particularly useful point in the piece explains again why comparing the different vaccines’ efficacy rates is problematic. The Moderna and Pfizer large-scale human studies were performed in different geographic regions “and at slightly different time points in the pandemic when different variants of COVID-19 were circulating”: https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explained.html.
6) Or as Helen Branswell puts it in her 2/2/21 STAT story that compares the Johnson & Johnson vaccine efficacy with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines: “Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines were tested before the emergence of troubling new variants in Britain, South Africa, and Brazil.” Her story also clearly states the different outcomes measured for the 3 vaccines now authorized for emergency use in the U.S. She adds: “Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines were tested before the emergence of troubling new variants in Britain, South Africa, and Brazil. It’s not entirely clear how well they will work against these mutated viruses: https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/02/comparing-the-covid-19-vaccines-developed-by-pfizer-moderna-and-johnson-johnson/.
7) Freelance journalist Wudan Yan nicely explains in this 2/17/21 piece for New York magazine’s Intelligencer how the COVID-19 vaccines that rely on mRNA technology can be “readily” modified to improve their protection against new variants of SARS-CoV-2. Pfizer and Moderna say their COVID-19 vaccines, which both rely on mRNA, already seem to provide protection against currently circulating viral variants, but both companies also have vaccine updates in the works. Pfizer says it could potentially have an updated vaccine ready, presumably for human testing, in 60 days, Yan reports. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration might allow for safety testing of the updates on “a few hundred people” instead of on the tens of thousands that the original vaccines were tested on — which would dramatically speed up their availability for the public (I think this streamlined assessment is more or less the approach, too, for testing the annual updates to flu vaccines). Vaccine update basics: The mRNA vaccines inject us with a piece of the coronavirus’s genetic information (mRNA) that then turns inside our bodies into a complex molecule (specifically, a portion of one of the virus’s proteins — the “spike"). Our bodies learn to mount an immune response to the protein, “similar to what would happen if we were exposed to the full virus,” Yan writes. To tweak the vaccines to account for new variants, researchers would swap in the slightly different mRNA segments that make the piece of the spike protein found in the variants, the story states. Researchers are not sure about the wisdom of updating COVID-19 vaccines that rely on a virus called an adenovirus (these cause a lot of common colds) to carry the coronavirus genetic material into our bodies, Yan writes, but they have ideas for how to work around those questions too: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/how-covid-vaccines-will-be-upgraded-to-fight-new-variants.html.
8) Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s 2/26/21 story for Science summarizes the rapid progress under way to study in children and adolescents the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines made by several companies. In the U.S. “young people make up about 250 of 500,000 total deaths” from COVID-19, Couzin-Frankel reports. However, COVID-19 is causing more deaths in young people than flu does in a typical season, she adds. And children can transmit SARS-CoV-2 to adults so “protecting kids will be key to driving down infection rates,” the story states. Unlike the studies in adults, these studies will “primarily rely on immune markers as a proxy for vaccine effectiveness,” Couzin-Frankel writes. By June, Pfizer plans to seek regulatory approval based on studies of its COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents, and the company will start a similar study "in 5- to 11-year-olds within a couple of months, and in under 5-year-olds later this year,” the story states: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/874.
9) A story by Claudia Wallis for Scientific American’s March issue reports some of the following strategies for addressing the hesitancy reportedly held by some in the U.S. to getting a COVID-19 vaccine: 1) focus on enlightening people who are ambivalent or hesitant about the vaccine, not committed “anti-vaxxers," who are a “tiny slice of the population,” Wallis writes: 2) providing scientific facts does not convince anxious people; instead “address the lack of trust or tech people with trusted messengers,” says a Dartmouth College political scientist quoted in the piece; 3) lower levels of vaccination in low-income communities reflect “practical barriers” to getting the vaccine, which can be addressed with extended hours at vaccine sites and emphasizing that the vaccine is free, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation director of racial equity and health policy, the story states: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/7-ways-to-reduce-reluctance-to-take-covid-vaccines/.
10) Also, it’s probably wise not to assume that COVID-19 vaccination attitudes and polls accurately reflect behavior, that is, whether people will actually brave significant hurdles and get a COVID-19 vaccine when available. On 2/20/21 Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, retweeted a video posted the same day by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing showing a long line of committed and hopeful vaccine recipients outside a 24-hour walk-up vaccination site event at Temple University in Philadelphia. It was a 24-hour, walk-up vaccination event held last weekend ,and it was hugely popular:
11) Health care workers in already “brain-drained” Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa are dying of COVID-19, while such workers in many wealthier countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas are already vaccinated, reports Kai Kupferschmidt at Science (2/17/21). The deaths echo other global inequities revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a scarcity of ventilators, oxygen and intensive-care units “throughout the African continent, for instance,” Kupferschmidt writes. More equitable vaccination efforts worldwide “would drive down hospitalizations and deaths everywhere sooner, allowing societies to reopen and economies to recover,” the story states. A vaccine acquisition group among African countries was expected to receive enough doses last month to allow vaccination of health care workers by now, the story states. But while Western countries plan to achieve full vaccination of their populations by summer or fall, Kupferschmidt reports, the group’s aim by the end of the year is only to vaccinate about 35 percent of the population of nations in Africa, given access constraints: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/unprotected-african-health-workers-die-rich-countries-buy-covid-19-vaccines.
PUBLIC HEALTH:
12) Here’s a highly accessible, updated guide to face masks, by Tara Parker-Pope at The New York Times (2/24/21). It is laid out as a slide show with brief captions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/well/n95-kn94-medical-masks.html.
13) Wudan Yan did us a favor by summarizing the strengths, weaknesses, speed, cost and accuracy of by-mail (dozens now are authorized for use in the U.S.) and other at-home SARS-CoV-2 tests (three now are authorized for U.S. use), available now in the U.S. “These tests are not nearly as accurate as those taken in a clinic,” but they make up for that shortcoming with speed, the 2/26/21 piece at The New York Times suggests: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26./well/live/at-home-covid-testing.html.
14) David Quammen continues to write more eloquently than we possibly deserve about the interdependence of human health and environmental health. In a recent essay at The New York Times (2/19/21), he starts by relating the recent case of two coughing gorillas at a San Diego zoo as as an example of diseases, including COVID-19, that can spill from wild animals to humans and then back to nonhuman animals. To date, he writes that news has reported on human transmission of the new coronavirus to minks on fur farms; to tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo in New York City; to snow leopards at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky; and to a tiger at the zoo in Knoxville, Tenn. SARS-CoV-2 can infect more species of wild animals than some other respiratory infections, Quammen writes, which raises concerns that it could circulate “endlessly in wild animal populations, if they are large and dense,” and then spill back into humans. He forecasts a future five years from now when the coronavirus continues to circulate among perhaps a billion people worldwide who remain unvaccinated and among wildlife populations. New variants would continue to evolve, potentially dangerous ones. “If that happens, this coronavirus will also be reminding us…of the humbling fact to which Charles Darwin alerted us more than a century and a half ago: We are animals, too”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opinion/covid-symptoms-gorillas.html.
15) Another simple reminder that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is spread through food or food packaging:
16) I like this accessible and fun video illustrating the concept of herd immunity and how it could play out in the COVID-19 pandemic, by Oregon Public Radio (2/24/21). Thanks to a reader for suggesting this piece:
SCIENCE:
17) A 2/24/21 tweet by Dr. Atul Gawande drew my attention to randomized study published 2/23/21 in JAMA Psychiatry which looked at, as Gawande puts it, the impact in July through September 2020 when “college volunteers with 2 hours of training simply called a roster of 6-9 folks two to five times a week (elders’ choice) to ask how they were.” The outcome after four weeks: the calls, designed to last less than 10 minutes, “reduced loneliness, depression, and anxiety in Meals on Wheels participants who live alone,” Gawande wrote:
ENTERTAINMENT:
18) it’s easy once you know how…
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22) sounds of the wind (estimated at 5 meters per second or about 11 miles per hour) and the Perseverance rover on Mars: https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-first-mars-sounds-audio. Here is the clip on Soundcloud with the rover noise edited out:
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