Random discussion of Covid-19 not specifically related to restaurants or food

Non-regional discussions Non-regional miscellany
2452

“It’s the wild west out there,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “There are no public health measures at all. We’re in a very peculiar spot, where the risk is vivid and it’s out there, but we’ve let our guard down and we’ve chosen, deliberately, to expose ourselves and make ourselves more vulnerable.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, would like to see more money for testing and vaccine development, as well as stronger messaging from the Biden administration and top health officials. She was dismayed recently on a trip to southern California, where she saw few people wearing masks in the airport. “This is what happens when you don’t have politicians and leaders taking a strong stand on this,” she said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/10/omicron-variant-ba5-covid-reinfection/

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2453

Are there countries with mask mandates and other rational public health measures still in place?

2454

I think China and South Korea (and some other Asian countries) still have outdoor mask mandates

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2455

China’s public health policy re Covid is about as irrational as it gets without pretending it doesn’t exist.

2456

Your question was if there are still countries with mask mandate and not if the rules make sense :wink:

2457

I no longer believe that mask mandates are rational. And China’s “zero covid” notion, which is absolutely ludicrous-to-the-extreme overkill, illustrates draconian intervention by government “to the max”. Yeah, it has greatly postponed infections there, but it won’t forever. Even after everyone is vaccinated in China, they’ll still be vulnerable. None of the vaccines are 100% protective against infection, and none gives lifetime protection against all variants. And none of the common masks are anywhere close to 100% effective in both directions. And going around sanitizing surfaces is flat-out ridiculous with what is now well understood about transmission.

I’m sick to death of health departments declaring masks on, masks off, masks on, masks off, masks on ad nauseum. Eventually everyone is going to get some variant of covid, with or without masks. And probably more than once. As long as hospitals aren’t getting close to becoming overloaded, this kind of endless mandated public policy is irrational. I know this sounds like a Red-Hat point of view, but in this case it’s just borne out of increasing frustration with the government’s endlessly vacillating responses. Masking is not a permanent way to go. Sure, do it yourself personally if you want. Just don’t constantly impose mandates on the rest of us to do so.

I’m also very tired of not being able to see my physician’s face and for him/her not being able to see mine. It’s like robot talking to robot. At some point masks in healthcare settings have to come off, too. The question is when, and under what circumstances. Healthcare workers have never before been masked-up (now going on for years) for any other airborne-transmittable virus. Not ever. If the number of healthcare workers out sick with covid starts to reduce staff appreciably, then ok in that setting. Just not forever without clear justification.

The solution isn’t masks. The solution is to have “nimble” vaccination development, in the manner of flu vaccination development and response, as we’ve discussed earlier. And for people to then actually get the shots.

If anything is going to be mandated by the government, it should be vaccinations, including keeping up with those that protect against new variants. It’s appalling that such a large swath of the public still hasn’t had even the first two shots, and more so that a large percentage never got a third (let alone the fourth, although that’s another story).

On a related subject, I was happy to read that pharmacists can now prescribe drugs (Paxlovid, at least) that help to keep a covid infection from becoming serious, for people who are most at risk of complications. That was a good step to take.

2458

Since with the current Supreme Court majority I doubt there is a path forward for any president to get any vaccine mandates moving for a long time before it will get shot down by the Scotus. Based on this, mask (mandates) might be for a long time one of the best protection we have against covid (especially in a health care setting)

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2459

Which point is after this pandemic is over and before the next one starts. Except in surgery, infectious disease wards, and the the like.

Masks work. If you’re tired of them, boo hoo hoo.

The flu is seasonal and doesn’t mutate as fast as Covid. By the time Moderna et al. reformulated their vaccine for Omicron BA.1, it was extinct.

2460

Well yes, of course.

Really?

2461

Unfortunately, I have to agree.

We no longer really even have an unbiased, constitutionally-focused, precedent-conscious, settled-law-respecting “supreme court”. What we now have is a bunch of people who sit on their throne in a marbled building with ultimate authoritarian unbridled power from which they can enact unretractable decrees that are enforced on the entire population, and who can’t or won’t separate their legal judgement from their extreme politico-religious orientation.

Yes, any government mandate for vaccines would almost surely be struck down by the current “Extreme Court”.

2462

Is there some part of that you doubt?

2463

I was asking. I think you may well be right on that point, but do you have a definitive answer? I was under the impression that influenza viruses are pretty much constantly mutating. Mostly the same old strains, but constantly mutating into different, new variants, as with covid.

2464

I don’t recall ever reading news that a flu vaccine that was effective at the beginning of the season became ineffective due to the flu virus mutating, comparable to what happened with Omicron supplanting Delta in around a month.

Maybe Covid is mutating more radically because it’s been circulating among humans for such a relatively short time. And Omicron is one of the most transmissible viruses ever recorded, meaning it has more opportunities to mutate in a given period of time.

2465

From Pfizer:

Studies to date estimate that the novel coronavirus mutates at a rate approximately four times slower than the influenza virus, also known as the seasonal flu virus.

That’s a cherry-picked excerpt on my part. But here’s a link to the short, easy-to-read and well-illustrated tutorial from Pfizer on the subject of flu vs.coronavirus mutations, from which I drew the excerpt and that I found very informative.

How Do Viruses Mutate and What it Means for a Vaccine? | Pfizer

Note that the references are from 2020.

This synopsis doesn’t quite say what I thought was the case about mutation frequency with respect to influenza vs. covid. But I can see how I could have previously formed that impression.

2466

Good summary of the current BA5 data

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2467

SARS-CoV-2’s theoretical mutation rate relative to seasonal influenza viruses seems beside the point when we’ve seen multiple cases of a new variant supplanting the previously dominant one in a month or two.

The mutation rate seems similar to the percentage of infections that result in hospitalization: even if the rate is low, when you have a huge number of infections, the actual number of mutations / hospitalizations goes up.

2468

The comparison is of interest in the context of the response time for which modified vaccines against new covid mutations “of concern” can be developed, approved, and produced – aka “variant chasing”, as the Erictopol article (posted by Honkman) put it.

As I said in an earlier post, “pan-coronavirus shots are the holy grail, but I would anticipate these will take longer to develop and prove out in human trials. T-cell enhancing shots will probably be available first.”

Meanwhile we at least have Paxlovid becoming more available, especially now that pharmacists can prescribe it.

2469

But it is only a question of time until it will be much less useful/potent due to mutations in paxlovid binding region

2470

People who are treated with Paxlovid should rarely if ever spread the virus, so there should be little or no evolutionary pressure for the virus to evade it, especially compared with the opportunity provided by the over five billion people who have been vaccinated.

2471

That’s not how resistance to virus medication works - no virus medication work immediately and so there is plenty of time to develop point mutation for the virus - some of them orthosteric and some allosteric to paxlovid binding site. There problem is that we can’t use drug cocktails at this point (normal way to avoid resistance for a much longer time). And Pfizer even reported in their clinical trials that they started to see a number of different mutations. Here is a good summary of some of the ongoing research - and overall it is less of a question if but when we will see significant resistance.