The CDC will meet on Tuesday to discuss the Pfizer vaccine for children ages five through 11. The vials already being shipped have orange caps so they will be easy to distinguish from the adult strength vials. Both Pfizer and Moderna are testing vaccines for babies and preschoolers. That one is a bit harder for me than the five to 11 one. I'd need to see some statistics on how many babies and preschoolers catch covid and how bad those cases are. Preschoolers do group together in, where else, preschool, and both babies and preschoolers group together in day care settings. Still, as a parent, I'd have to give this one some serious thought.
A study looking at covid transmission within households found that a fully vaccinated contact has a 25 percent chance of catching covid from an infected household member. An unvaccinated contact has a 38 percent chance. But whether someone is fully vaccinated or unvaccinated makes little or no difference in how infectious they are to other people in the household. Early in the pandemic, there were reports and features on someone with covid living in the basement or attic and having no contact at all with the other members of the household. I don't see those any longer. I don't know if that's because people don't do that any longer or because it's old news and not worth reporting. Finally, the study suggested that vaccine-induced protection waned by about three months after someone's second shot, suggesting that boosters are a very good idea.
The island nation of Tonga has reported its first case of covid, a traveler arriving from New Zealand. The traveler was fully vaccinated and tested negative for covid before leaving New Zealand. Tonga's isolation has served it well since its health system may not be able to handle an outbreak. Tonga has about 106,000 people, 31 percent of whom are fully vaccinated and 48 percent of whom have gotten at least one dose.
Parosmia is a distorted sense of smell seen after covid and some other diseases. It can linger for as long as three years, at least after non-covid diseases. What smells are distorted varies from person to person. The scent something in distorted into rarely sounds pleasant. For some people, it might be the scent of coffee or chocolate that is distorted; for one particularly unlucky person, it was fresh air. I know someone who lost his sense of smell for certain things after a head injury. He can no longer smell chocolate, though its smell has not been replaced by any other odor. He also notes that it helped him loose a bit of weight.
Vaccination rates in New York City rose sharply as last night's midnight vaccination deadline loomed. The vaccination rate of sanitation workers rose from 67 percent to 76 percent; the rate for police rose from under 75 percent to 84 percent. Yesterday morning, 69 percent of the fire department had been vaccinated; by evening that had risen to 77 percent. The department still expects about 20 percent of fire stations to have to close; five in Manhattan and the Bronx already have. And despite the increase for sanitation workers, some Brooklyn and Staten Island residents are reporting delays in trash pickup.
I wonder how many people are dressing as a spike protein for Halloween. Or perhaps that's dated this year after being overdone last year.
1 comment:
My mother in law lost her sense of smell some years ago. In her case it nearly killed her, she was in hospital three weeks with food poisoning. I went in one day and was hit with a smell as I walked in the front door, I traced it (not hard) to a bag of prawns sitting in a sunny window. She'd put them in the sun to thaw the day before and forgotten about them. She would have eaten them, they looked ok.
Maybe the issue with the news is that it's not new. It's only interesting when something changes but cases, admissions and deaths are indistinguishable one week to the next. It just goes on and on.
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