The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 485 (985)

China had a record number of COVID cases this week including 31,656 on Thursday alone. Get your Valentine's Day and Easter shopping done soon; there are likely more supply chain disruptions coming. Protests are rare in China, but there are some happening. There was one in Xinjiang after a deadly fire triggered by the long lockdown there. Besides damaging the economy, zero COVID has undermined trust in the government. China needs to get the latest surge under control. Hospitals there are not ready for a sustained surge in serious cases. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that lifting COVID controls could put 5.8 million Chinese into intensive care. Given that China has four ICU beds per 100,000 people, that's not good. Only 40 percent of Chinese over the age of 80 have gotten any booster; of people over the age of 60, two-thirds have been boosted. These vaccinations were of the China-made vaccine. The government did just make Western-made mRNA vaccines available, but only to foreigners residing in China.

Existing monoclonal antibody treatments are not working well against Omicron variants, leading scientists to look for other antibodies that are attracted to vulnerable parts of the virus that have not yet been targeted. Most treatments so far have targeted the region of the spike protein where the virus attaches to the human cell. The drawback here is that the target changes frequently. Some scientists are now targeting the other end of the protein, an area called the stem helix. This part has not changed as new variants and subvariants have developed suggesting that it plays a vital role. Others are looking at the fusion peptide that inserts into the human cell membrane to pull the cell closer to the viral molecule. The antibodies under development are not as potent as the earlier ones but may be effective against a wider variety of coronaviruses.

I don't want to see a post-Thanksgiving wave lead into another Christmas one, but it might be worth it if it persuaded more people to get the latest booster. I've given up hope of anyone who is not yet vaccinated changing their mind this late in the game. Odds are that COVID is not going away.