The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 155 (655)

Word is that the FDA is planning to approve third, booster shots for children ages 11 through 15. That this came out today is appropriate. The Professor and I chatted with a neighbor this morning. He said that for a long time, his family did nothing because their daughter who's about nine was not able to be vaccinated. Now that she is vaccinated, he and his wife look at their teenage son and wonder just how vaccinated he still is months after his second injection. I expect they'll have him out for a booster the first day they're available. 

Covid cases in the US remain at their highest level, 488,000 on Wednesday. The seven-day average was over 300,000 as well. New cases have more than doubled in two weeks. In the past week alone, over two million cases have been reported nationally, and 15 states and territories reported more cases than in any other seven-day period. The WHO chief has warned that Delta and Omicron could combine in a "tsunami" of cases. Deaths are averaging around 1,500 per day, though a CDC forecast holds that over 44,000 people could die of covid over the next four weeks. 

A brief summary of the new CDC guidance on isolation and quarantine: People who are infected can re-enter society after five days if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving. They should then be masked for the next five days, indoors and out. Some groups, including nurses, have argued against this. Michigan has said that it will not follow this guideline. Some medical people say they would have required a negative test. A virologist at the University of Saskatchewan calls not requiring a negative test "reckless and, frankly, stupid." Those in favor of the revised guidelines estimate that less than a third of the people who should have isolated in the past really did so. The other argument against the new guidelines is that they make no distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. 

A new, not-yet-peer-reviewed study coming out of South Africa says that a Johnson & Johnson booster provides strong protection against Omicron, with the second shot raising protection further than do two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The FDA did not recommend a second Johnson & Johnson shot here because of the vaccine's link to a blood clotting condition. 

The National Health Service in Britain is erecting field wards on the grounds of eight hospitals. There were around 183,000 new cases Wednesday, days before the full impact of the Christmas holidays might be seen. The wards are called "Nightingale hubs" and each will handle 100 patients. This reminds me of the field hospitals set up around New York City in the very early days of the pandemic. 

China continues to pursue its zero-covid policy. They have locked down Xi'an, home to 13 million people because there were 1,117 covid cases there between December 9 and 19, a spike attributed to Delta rather than Omicron. The Winter Olympics in China may well be more "interesting" than the Summer Olympics in Japan were. 

Finally, I came across a mention of the likelihood that results of at-home covid tests are not often reported to the medical authorities. This mention was followed by the possibly rhetorical question of whether case counts serve a useful purpose if they are potentially inaccurate or at best estimates. Should we continue to report and use those figures? Hospitalizations and deaths are at least documented. I don't think there are a lot of at-home deaths that are going unreported.