Yesterday, I mentioned that the US had recorded at least 900,000 covid deaths. Imagine if Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte (North Carolina) became empty overnight. That's what losing 900,000 people in one fell swoop would resemble. I wondered how long it would take to hit the one million mark. The dean of the Brown University School of Public Health explains, "We got the medical science right. We failed on the social science. We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this. Those are the places where we have failed as America." Never underestimate the what? Stupidity? Gullibility? Nonchalance? of the American people. I would invoke my brother-in-law's "Half the population has an IQ under 100," but I don't believe that all vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant people are idiots. Some are, but not all. That said, we may never move far beyond our current 64 percent full vaccination rate.
A new push is on to protect immunocompromised people from covid. The CDC has shortened the waiting period between the third and fourth doses of Pfizer or Moderna from five months to three. Someone who originally got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should now get two additional doses rather than one. This follows seeing a large number of breakthrough infections in immunocompromised people. The CDC also gave doctors permission to give immunocompromised patients the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine outside the recommended schedule "where the benefits of vaccination are deemed to outweigh the potential and unknown risk."
CDC data suggest that boosters are most beneficial to older people. The booster does not seem to add much benefit to younger Americans; their first shots greatly decrease the risk of hospitalization and death. The caveat is that the data only go through the end of December and so miss most of the Omicron surge. Boosters aside, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York explains, "The real problem is the carnage among the unvaccinated." I do like the use of the word "carnage" there.
A recent study used self-reporting but found that people reporting that they always wore face masks or respirators such as N95 masks in public indoor settings were significantly less likely to test positive later. In other words, "...wearing a mask, wearing it consistently, will reduce your risk and the higher quality mask that you wear, the better protection that you have."
Several members of Congress are pushing for a "high-level independent" commission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus and the response to it from both the previous and current administrations. It would be similar to the commission that investigated the events of September 11, 2001. It will likely take a while for the proposal to be formally put forward, but so far it does have bipartisan support. It may be the only thing that has bipartisan support, at least that I know of.
Olympic update: Around 71,000 covid tests were conducted at the Olympics on Thursday. There were 21 positive tests. To the extent that the closed loop is working, the number of cases within it should fall as time goes by.
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