TIME TO MASK UP AGAIN?

Because the COVID-19 severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus continues to circulate, but more importantly, because of an uptick in infections and hospitalizations, I’ve decided to start a new thread, since the old one is a pretty large file. Let’s begin with a status check. As of mid-August 2023 there were:

U.S. Hospitalizations from COVID	Deaths from COVID in U.S.	Doses of vaccine given in U.S.
6,256,971	1,145,659	676,728,782^[1]

^[1] As of May 2023.

Variant	Name	R0 Value	Comments
XBB.1.5	Kraken	TBD	Emerged in Fall of 2022. The current booster shot being offered was designed with Kraken in mind. Level of risk low, variant on the decline.
XBB.1.9.1	Hyperion
XBB.1.9.2.5.1	Fornax	TBD	aka FL.1.5.1. As of (/2/2023 accounts for 14.5% of new U.S. cases.
XBB.1.9.2.5.1	Eris	TBD	Also known as EG.5. Eris as of 9/2/2023 accounts for 21.5% of new cases on the U.S. Currently no reports of increased disease severity due to Eris.
XBB.1.16	Acturus	TBD	First reported January 2023. Currently designated as a Virus of Interest by WHO. Prevalence of Acturis is on the rise. Slow weekly increase but variant is not significantly more problematic than other variants.
XBB.2.3	Acrux	TBD
BA2.86	Pirola	TBD	As of 9/19/2023, found in ten states. Pirola turning out to be milder than expected.

R0 value of <1 means the variant will disappear because it will not spread from Patient A to Patient B.

R0 value of 1 means each infected person will infect one other person.

R0 value of >1 means the variant will spread from Patient A to Patient B, Patient C and so on.

Mask or not

Currently there is no nation-wide requirment to wear a mask. However, senior citizens and those people with chronic issues such as COPD, heart disease, receiving cancer treatments, etc. are being urged to seriously consider wearing a mask again. And there are units of local government that are implementing masks on an ad hoc basis:

“Schools including Rutgers University in New Jersey and Morris Brown College in Georgia have issued mask mandates for their respective campuses, with the Atlanta-based school reinstating masks as a two-week precautionary measure.”

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Today, the U.S News & World Reports reported the areas of the U.S. with the highest COVID hospitalizations per 100,000 people. Of the list, the top ten counties were:

Saturday, September 2, 2023

COVID (C-19) confirmed rates are the highest since mid-May of this year. As of two weeks ago the average daily U.S. wide hospitalization rate for C-19 was 193,491, which represents a 31% increase from earlier in the month. However, due to home testing, the actual rate of newly acquired infections is undoubtedly higher. No doubt many of the 193,491 knew they had tested positive at home before presenting themselves to their emergency room with symptoms that they could not manage at home. The CDC’s MMWR (Morbitidy, Mortality Weekly Report) also shows an uptick in cases as seen below in the report dated September 1, 2023:

The current top three variants in circulation in the U.S. are Acturus, Hyperion and Acrux. None of these in itself are more serious then pervious iterations of the coronavirus, except, perhaps, in vulnerable populations. Add to this the RSV virus and the approach of the seasonal flu and the winter months of the Northern Hemisphere will be busy.

Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency physician and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Her recommendation for Labor Day weekend is this:

“The primary factor people should consider in thinking through the degree of precautions to take is how vulnerable they are to severe illness if they were to contract Covid-19. For younger and generally healthy people, especially if they have had the coronavirus before and have been vaccinated, the chance of severe illness is very low.”

And what about the rest of us? Dr. Wen noted:

“Most people still becoming severely ill from the coronavirus are those 65 and over and who have serious underlying medical conditions such as heart disease, lung disease and immunocompromise. Beyond ensuring that their COVID booster shots are up-to-date, these individuals should take additional precautions . . . People should also know whether they are eligible for the antiviral medication, Paxlovid, and to have a plan for how to access it. Studies have shown that Paxlovid can reduce the risk of hospitalization or death by as much as 80% when taken within five days of symptom onset.”

The new COVID boster shot should be available by the first week of October.

The good news is that so far, subsequent C-19 infections with some exceptions tend to be milder than those experiences with the Omicron variant that ravaged the U.S. last year.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

I read of a new attempt by the CDC to help ordinary Americans understand COVID variants. I decided to adapt it for my blog under Fair Use provisions of the Copyright Act.

So, this is a photo of tall shrub in my back yard. The plant identification app on my phone identifies it as Garden forsythia. The green leaves are attached to branches that are alive and moist if you scratch away the bark. And each green branch has smaller sprouts of its own.

But there are many dead branches and twigs that have no leaves, and they snap when you bend the branch, because it has no life to it. At one point in the past it did have life, else it could not have grown. But for some reason it died while other branches grew vigorously.

Now, think of the original COVID virus back in January of 2020 as being a tree with a single trunk putting out branches. Each branch represents a variant of the original virus. After three years the branches with leaves represent perhaps the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants of COVID. These variants either spread rapidly, made humans very ill, created long lasting complications or caused many people to lose their lives. While one of the largest green branches might represent Omicron, there are many smaller branches attached to the “Omicron” branch, each different in some way than the others on the same branch. So it is with Omicron COVID variants. The dead branches are strains of the virus that just faded away without causing much harm, such as Beta, Gamma and Kraken. The remaining green branches are the more lethal, longstanding variants or those that are now just emerging.