The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 334 (834)

Today's monkeypox factoid: The CDC has confirmed 244 cases in the US, while WHO counts 3,400 globally, most of which are in Europe.

We should know by the end of the day what the FDA's independent advisory panel is recommending in terms of a fall covid booster, basically if the vaccines should be reformulated to target Omicron or its subvariants. Good question since BA.4 and BA.5 now account for half of the new cases in the US. The possible time line has a decision on the vaccine's makeup being made by next week so that booster shots could start in October. If the vaccine is to be targeted, Pfizer and Moderna say they will need as much time as possible to get vaccines ready. The epidemiology folks at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill project a best-case covid scenario of 95,000 deaths in a period ending in March 2023; the worst-case scenario is over 200,000 deaths. In other words, we won't be out of the woods for a while yet no matter what a lot of people are saying.

China is cutting the quarantine time for international arrivals in half while maintaining its zero covid policy. The quarantine period was two weeks and will now be one. Arrivals will spend seven days in a government-run quarantine facility followed by three days at home. There will be regular covid testing during those ten days. Local governments are free to impose additional requirements. A representative of the European Chamber of Commerce in China says that "China may have to maintain a restricted immigration policy beyond the summer of 2023." The isolation for suspected close contacts of covid patients will become the same as the quarantine period for international arrivals. 

Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area is dropping the mask mandate it imposed three weeks ago, saying that cases were getting under control again. 

Finally, in a "Really? You just figured this out?" move, a WHO official says that the more times a person becomes infected with covid, the more likely the person is to be "unlucky" and develop long covid. I'm not sure what the grounds would be for thinking that the chances for long covid would decrease with subsequent infections. That the chances would remain at around 20 percent for each infection makes more sense to me. That's probably why someone else is in change and not me, not that I would even want to be.