Thursday Throughput: The Trailing Edge of Omicron Edition

I used NextStrain.org with a SARS-CoV-2 data set (as of 2021 Dec 01) curated by Emma Hodcroft (available at https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/21K.Omicron) to generate an “unrooted” tree (this is a style name, though the tree is rooted on the oldest sequences) scaled by genetic distance, which I then edited to indicate the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omicron variants. Graphic by Soupvector, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

[ThTh1] As the Omicron wave wanes across the country, COVID restrictions are falling like dominos. Even in Democratically controlled states and cities, mask mandates are being rescinded, businesses are going to full pre-pandemic status and vaccine passport ideas are being shelved. Does this mean, as seemingly half the conservative commentariat is saying, that COVID restrictions were wrong all the time and we damaged our country for nothing?

No.

What it means is that the circumstances have changed and so our policy is changing along with it. The vast majority of Americans are vaccinated, and the vaccines still protect against severe disease. Those who are not vaccinate are unlikely to change their minds. And while they are still a danger to the vulnerable, they are mostly a danger to themselves. Many of them have already been exposed to Omicron and have some degree of “natural” immunity.

The plan for COVID was never to mask everyone forever. The plan for COVID was not to close restaurants forever. The plan was to buckle down until the situation improved, one way or another. And the situation now is massively better than it was two years ago. The dominant variant is less lethal. And we have abundant vaccines and ramping up therapeutics that protect those willing to take them. I’m sure there are people who would love to keep restrictions in place until COVID is gone. But ultimately, our efforts to control the disease have to be tempered by what the population is willing to do.

We must also be cognizant of the reality that COVID may not be done with us. There tends to be pattern to these things:

For all those removing mask mandates, I repeat a graphic I've been using since March 2020. We keep doing this over and over and over. pic.twitter.com/LjYpukLi0G

— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) February 8, 2022

The sudden explosion of COVID numbers in Denmark just after all COVID restrictions were removed does suggest this note of caution is warranted. But if we’re going to expect people to buckle down if a future variant hits, we have to ease up when those variants fade.

But, really, I feel like there’s a bit of “Guns of August” thing going on here, where we want to have perpetual arguments about things that are no longer relevant. What we really need to be doing is thinking about the future: what we do if a much more dangerous variant of COVID emerges; what we do if a much more dangerous variant of the flu emerges; what we do if a different virus goes global? If we’re going to have to “live with COVID”, what does that world look like?

Remember … we’ve done this before. Many of the things we do every day — such as not defecating in the streets or tossing dead bodies in our drinking water — are things we started doing to reduce disease. We wash dishes, we wash ourselves, we throw out moldy food, we clean scrapes and cuts — to keep disease in check. We wear seatbelts, we put safeties on our guns, we put child safety locks on medicines. Many of these things we do without thinking. But they all reduce our risks in various ways.

How do we reduce the risks in a post-COVID world? We need to be investing more research into universal coronavirus vaccines that can deal with any variant. We need to be vaccinating people all over the world and increasing our disease surveillance so that we can spot new disease and variants before they explode into the general population. We need to be putting a huge effort into figuring out if remote schooling doesn’t have to be a fiasco — the next variant may target kids for all we know. We need to especially focus on ventilation, revamping buildings to turn over their internal air as fast as practicable.

The post-COVID world doesn’t have to be a nightmare of preventable death. Nor does it have to be a nightmare of lockdowns and restrictions. We have to evaluate what has happened over the last two years to see what worked and what didn’t. But that evaluation should not be about assigning blame; it should be about learning lessons. It should be about — as it has been for all of human history — finding ways to reduce risk that don’t damage our society.

[ThTh2] The BBC asks an interesting question: what happened to the AstroZeneca vaccine? While the AZ vaccine was the first developed, it has come to be overshadowed by the mRNA vaccines. They go into the politics of the vaccines and how that might have affected it, but I think the answer is much simpler: the mRNA vaccines were new. They got the most attention because they were revolutionary tech. And so, they eventually came to overshadow not just the AstroZeneca vaccine but the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

At this point, it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. The main impediments to vaccinating people are vaccine resistance and logistics, not availability.

[ThTh3] Astronomy is a 6000-year story of the universe telling us we don’t know half as much as we think we do:

#Space Facts 😲 pic.twitter.com/7DoegYO3SM

— Space_Hub (@SpaceHub_SL) February 15, 2022

[ThTh4] NASA has selected its next two missions to study the Sun. Congratulations to the teams that got picked.

[ThTh5] I’ve written before about the dangers of the coming Solar maximum. Last week, the Sun decided to fry a bunch of Elon Musk’s satellites. As you can probably imagine, I’m just heartbroken about this.

[ThTh6] Great thread on the zanclean megaflood.

[ThTh7] Don’t look now but bacteria are eating the Titanic.

[ThTh8] One of the most fun things to talk about is Dark Matter. This matter constitutes 95% of the mass in the universe and we have no idea what it is. Well … we could get some new insights by studying it in our own Solar System.

[ThTh9] A new and large study indicates that state-run pre-K systems may actually harm children’s long-term development. There is an intense debate going on about why this may be. I lean toward the explanation that many of these programs are instruction-based, run likes schools for older kids. But little kids seem to do better in play-based pre-K where they mainly focus on social skills and getting to know other kid. Instruction rigor is slowly introduced as they get older. Both of my kids went to a play-based pre-K program and both transitioned well to elementary school.

There’s a great scene in the movie Uncle Buck where the title character tears into a school Administrator for thinking a 6-year-old should be taking her educational career seriously. It’s funny but I think there’s also a point: the solution our educational woes is not to crush the life out of younger and younger kids; it’s to slowly open them up to the glorious splendor of knowledge and learning. That’s not something that a giant government program is going to be good at. And so, we should be cautious as we stampede toward “universal pre-K”.

[ThTh9] Advances in nuclear fusion seem to be coming faster and faster. It used to be that the “we’re a decade away from commercial nuclear fusion” folks were wild-eyed futurists and science fictions fans. But I’m hearing that more and more from actual engineers and plasma physicists. We have made more progress in the last five years than in the previous fifty. And if we do get to a point where this is real thing, it would solve many many problems.

[ThTh10] Speaking of which, France is addressing both global warming and rising Russian influence in the best way possible right now: building more fission reactors.