The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 364 (864)

A quickie from yesterday's notes that I did not include: Australia just set a new record in covid hospitalizations and is seeing a sharp rise in covid deaths. Why? There has been a low uptake on booster vaccinations but, possibly more importantly, it's winter there. I wonder what we'll be seeing in six months. Winter is coming. 

There was one more percentage from the survey of parents of the youngest children. Some 13 percent said they would get their young children vaccinated only if they had to. This brings the total of somewhat negative responses to 83 percent. More generally, a majority of parents of the youngest children consider vaccination a greater risk to their children than covid. 

One last quickie: Remember the murder hornets from the early days of the pandemic? For a while, they were called "Asian giant hornets." They now have an official name, Northern giant hornets. I don't know about you, but I really liked "murder hornets."

An article from Science Translational Medicine reports that researchers in London found that a specific area of covid's spike protein is a good target for a pan-coronavirus vaccine that could offer protection against all covid variants as well as the common cold. They do caution that there is "a lot of research still to do." I hope that research is fruitful.

About five percent of infected adults may have long-term smell or taste problems. There have been over 550 million confirmed cases of covid. Of these, it appears that 15 million people experience deficiencies of smell and 12 million people experience deficiencies of taste. Some unlucky people experience both. These deficiencies can last as long as at least six months. Women are more likely to develop these problems than men. 

Since we're not there yet, there is research showing that the end of an epidemic or pandemic involves more than disease rates. Those would dictate only the medical end to the epidemic or pandemic. There is also a political end when the crisis and associated regulations pass. Finally, only after a return to normalcy is there a social end. To think of an epidemic or pandemic as a series of discrete biological events is short-sighted. It also includes moral crises that can test the limits of social cohesion and trust. We've seen a lot of those lately and will likely see many more before there is any real end to all this.