According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.
Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!
It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.
In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
In the U.S., it feels like we are done with Covid. At least, for those of us who are vaccinated adults. For those of us with children, life is still not back to normal because even as we are being told we can return to the office, we can’t actually do that because the children are still home. And the world is clearly not done with Covid-19, as vaccination is proceeding slowly in many countries outside North America and Europe.
Anyway, here is one more simulation dashboard that shows an ensemble of simulations going forward up to four weeks. This might be useful to see if there are blips on the horizon when (if?) the kids really are allowed to go back to school in the fall. Here’s an article describing the site in MIT technology review.
The confusion among the public continues. Basically, vaccinated people have a 10% or so chance of getting infected Covid-19 if they are exposed to it. If they are infected, they won’t get seriously ill but they might be able to spread it to un-vaccinated people who might then get seriously ill. If you multiply the probabilities, the odds of getting infected by a vaccinated person and then getting seriously ill are low, and the odds that a given person we are exposed to will be vaccinated is getting higher all the time, so the risk is getting lower all the time. Vaccinated people are being asked to wear masks to help that risk drop as quickly as possible. BUT half the population is hearing “the government is sugar-coating the science” and the other half of the population is hearing “vaccinated people are likely to spread the virus”. Neither of these messages is accurate in my view – I’m hearing the risk is low and getting lower, and we all need to get vaccinated to get the risk as low as possible (which will not be zero, but we can all move on to worrying about other diseases such as antibiotic-resistant syphilis).
When scientists are saying “we are not 100% sure” people who have had Covid-19 will have some immunity to reinfection, many smart people I know are hearing “people who have had Covid-19 have no immunity to infection”. Similarly, when scientists say they are not absolutely sure vaccinated people will not spread the virus (although they are quickly changing their tune on this one as they look at the evidence), people are hearing that vaccinated people are spreading the virus. Here is at least one study showing that when people who had a confirmed infection were tested again three months later, protection against reinfection was pretty good but not perfect at about 80%. It appears to have been lower in people over 65 at about 50%.
The CDC and others have also thrown out 3 months as a minimum amount of time they are confident people are protected against reinfection or protected by a vaccine. I think this is just a conservative estimate in the face of limited information, but again the public is hearing “no protection after 3 months”. In this study, they tested again after 6 months and found no decrease in the level of protection (still about 80%).
So my view is that logic suggests being infected would provide at least some protection against reinfection and being able to spread the virus, and the same for vaccination. I say this because this is how other diseases work. And now the data are backing that up. The science and public health policy communication are still pretty bad, and like a toxic spill, bad communication that takes a few hours can take years to clean up on the surface and there will still be puddles of toxic mess for decades whenever you turn over a rock.
It seems that the efforts to trace Covid-19 back to bats in the Wuhan province are pretty inconclusive. SARS and MERS were both definitively (?) traced back to bats, so people seem to have jumped to this conclusion. “Similar” viruses have been found in bats, but bats have all kinds of things and the family of coronaviruses seems to be extremely common. The WHO team does say it is extremely unlikely that any of the “several” laboratories studying coronaviruses in the city would have made a mistake leading to emergence of this virus. (This alone raises a few questions for me. Is it unusual for a city the size of Wuhan in China or other countries to have several laboratories with coronaviruses lying around? Or do most big cities have some kind of epidemiological laboratory, and the family of coronaviruses is so common that almost any lab would have examples of it in the fridge? What about the dangerous ones.) They also say definitively this is a natural virus, not a genetically engineered one.
I’ve been to “wet markets” in Singapore and Thailand, which could well be tame compared to the one in Wuhan, I have no idea. I would hypothesize that you have a lot of people working, shopping, and eating in very close proximity to each other. Sometimes you have people doing grosser things, like smoking, or spitting. Cats and dogs sometimes roam freely. And sometimes these markets are air conditioned, I have seen it both ways. So if someone already had the virus, it might have spread between people in the market and have nothing particularly to do with food or wild animals.
But I found it interesting to read what wild animals were actually for sale in the Wuhan market. Do people eat bats, or keep them as pets? (And before you judge as a westerner, be aware people in other cultures are just as horrified by some of our habits and things we eat as we are by some of theirs.)
The so-called wet market had 653 stalls and more than 1,180 employees supplying seafood products as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and live animals before it closed on Jan. 1, 2020. Days before, 10 stall operators were trading live wild animals, including chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, wild boar, giant salamanders, hedgehogs, sika deer. Farmed, wild and domestic animals were also traded at the market including snakes, frogs, quails, bamboo rats, rabbits, crocodiles and badgers…
Bloomberg
So no bats mentioned. I also find myself thinking about the various “bird flu” and “swine flu” scares of the past. It is often human-livestock contact that gives rise to concerning pathogens, so we should keep that in mind. And of course, there are still plenty of deadly pathogens being spread by mosquitoes, fleas and ticks while we are fixated on this one (admittedly horrific) unusual coronavirus incident.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
Most hopeful story: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
It’s pretty clear that the world needs some kind of surveillance or inspection regime to monitor both biological weapons and natural disease outbreaks. This Wired article goes into some of the possibilities.
The BSL-4 labs are proliferating around the world according to the article, and this seems like a scary situation to me.
My modest proposal would be to fund the WHO fully right away and have it investigate natural disease outbreaks with member state cooperation. Then have the Security Council establish the heavy-duty biological weapons inspection program with the heavies right away. Like it or not, we also need surveillance to find the hidden labs or even just people messing around with dangerous stuff in their garages and basements. This will be much easier for the little guy to do than, say, getting your hands on some enriched uranium or Novachok.
This is an existential risk – we may not get many chances to make mistakes and learn from them. The risk will keep increasing and under any kind of moral or responsible government framework it has to be dealt with right away.
Let’s do some coronavirus math! This is a word problem, kids. I’m writing on January 14, 2021, and this post will be horribly outdated, but possibly of historical interest, when you read it.
The total number of cases confirmed to date as of today, in the U.S.: “23.1 million+” (New York Times)
The CDC’s ratio of actual cases to confirmed cases: 7.2 (CDC)
Number of cumulative cases in the U.S. so far: 23.1 million * 7.2 = 166 million (166,320,000)
Population of the United States: 328.2 million (Google)
% of our population that has had the coronavirus = 166 / 328.2 = 51%
% of our population that has been vaccinated: 3.1% (Financial Times)
But all other things being equal (which I am sure they are not), 51% of the people vaccinated will have already had the coronavirus, so the vaccine so far adds 1.6% to 51% of our population. Call it 53% to be generous.
We have heard a variety of estimates on what constitutes herd immunity, but the number 70% seems to be sticking at least in the media (I don’t have a source handy, and need to go do some other things now.) So we might not be that far off. The (painfully) slow but steady vaccine rollout tortoise will eventually get to the finish line, people are continuing to get infected at high rates every day in the meantime, and nobody wants to see another wave from the new variant, but if and when it hits us it might push us over the mark (at a horrific human cost, of course).
One last thought is that at the moment, I suspect we are immunizing people who are more likely to have already had an infection than the population as a whole. We are being told this is the most ethical approach, or the quickest way to lower risk for the population as a whole, or some combination of the two. The ethical statement may be true, although this seems subjective. I thought ethics was not up to ethicists, but rather ethicists were supposed to ascertain what our society as a whole considers ethical, and maybe compare that to other human societies past and present. I haven’t seen public polls of what people think is ethical, although they may exist. I can see a case that the way the vaccine is being rolled out is ethical, but I can also see a case for a random lottery being equally ethical.
Better planning and communication would not just be ethical, they are the common sense need and our government is continuing to fail, fail, fail and people are dying, which is the opposite of ethical governance. To my ears, it is arrogant to hear them lecturing us about ethics.