How about a bit of good news? For the first time in five months, US covid hospitalizations have dipped below 25,000. Bivalent boosters are available to children as young as age five. The pandemic or, perhaps, working remotely, contributed to a mini baby boom in 2021. The birth rate for US mothers was up 6.2 percent relative to 2015-2019. The increase was more pronounced for first-time mothers and college-educated women. Women with less education showed a decline in birth rate. 2022 numbers from California suggest that the boom is continuing.
Some not-so-good news. The US high school class of 2022 had the lowest average ACT score in over 30 years. The pandemic affected three academic years, and it may take more years than that to recover. The Professor has continued last year's complaints that the second-year engineering students in his physics class just do not have it compared to the ones he taught in pre-pandemic years. Mental health is also declining among teenagers.
The Party Congress is meeting in Beijing, and the party line is sticking with long covid. There have even been some public demonstrations, and the government response was severe. Many social media accounts have been blocked in an effort to stop the protesting.
Finally, there were reports--which I had not heard--that researchers at Boston University created a new and deadlier strain of SARS-CoV-2. Some reports said the new strain had an 80 percent kill rate. The university says that the research was not gain-of-function, but that "...this research made the virus replicate less dangerous." Researchers were looking at the Omicron spike protein and its role in the variant's high transmissibility. Combining the Omicron spike protein with an ancestral coronavirus strain did yield an 80 percent mortality rate in 10 mice. Researchers suggest that while vaccine escape is defined by mutations in the spike protein, the pathogenicity determinants are outside the spike protein. One of the funding agencies, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has said it was not informed of the specific research question. The university responded that money from NIAID was not used for the steps specifically leading to the creation of the high-mortality strain, and noted that the determination of viral proteins "...will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies."
1 comment:
They created a strain? That's scary in itself. Chris Bohjalian's novel Red Lotus, about a human-engineered pandemic, came out in February 2020. Eerily prescient.
Post a Comment