The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 363 (863)

Schools start in some places in a couple of weeks. Are students and schools ready? A CNN analysis reports that only 45 percent of children and teens are fully vaccinated and only 9.5 percent are up-to-date on covid vaccinations. (The CDC defines "fully vaccinated" as two weeks past the second of the two initial mRNA shots and "up-to-date" as having had whatever booster(s) for which a person is eligible.) While 4.2 million teens ages 12 through 17 are up-to-date, only 796,000 children ages five through 11 are. As for children too young for school but not for preschool or day care, only 2.8 percent of children under the age of five have gotten vaccinated. In April, 27 percent of parents responding to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll said that they would definitely not get their younger children vaccinated. That had increased to 43 percent in July. Similar "definitely not" responses were given by 37 percent of parents of children ages five through 11 and 28 percent of parents of children ages 12 through 17.

As for monkeypox, I found the layout of today's Washington Post op-ed page interesting. The leftmost column held Alyssa Rosenberg's "Young kids' Covid vaccine uptake is shockingly low." The rightmost column held Leanna S. Wen's "We must contain monkeypox." Dueling diseases, anyone?

In China, Wuhan has shut down a district of about one million people after four asymptomatic cases of covid were identified. All restaurants, entertainment venues, places of worship, and public transit are closed for at least three days. These are called "temporary control measures." Zero covid hasn't gone away yet.

POTUS has tested negative twice and left his "strict" isolation after five days. Now we'll see if he gets Paxlovid rebound. The CDC used to recommend 10 days of isolation. This was cut in half supposedly because most transmission was said to occur early, one to two days before symptoms started to two to three days after that. An article in Nature asserts that ten was better than five is. PCR tests can return positive results even after infection ends. These tests may be picking up non-infectious traces of viral RNA. Lateral flow tests offer a better guide to infectiousness by detecting proteins produced by active replicating virus. Symptoms should not be used in the calculation as they can persist even after tests return as negatives. One study reported that many people maintain a high enough viral load to still be infectious at days seven through 10. A better rule of thumb than the CDC's current five days would be their former ten days. Few people remain infectious after 10 days unless they experience Paxlovid rebound infections. 

If The Professor or I do happen to get infected, we'll be going by the previously recommended 10 days, not the now-official five.