Throughput: COVID Blogger Edition
COVID tests and Paxlovid.
As I was writing this, news broke that President Biden has been diagnoses with COVID-19. Hopefully, he will have a full recovery.
[ThTh1] On Friday afternoon, I felt fine. I’d gotten some work done, was preparing for in-laws to visit and was looking forward to a weekend of cleaning the house and visiting the pool. I went downstairs for a Coke. And by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, I was shivering uncontrollably. This was my first inkling that the cough that had been going around the family wasn’t just a cold.
I have probably written more about COVID-19 than I have written about any subject. From the first stirrings in China to the rise of vaccine disinformation to the dispersal of it to a regular feature of our lives. But, by some miracle, I never actually got it, at least that I know of. My family was extra-cautious because my wife has multiple sclerosis. We masked, cleaned anything that came into the house, isolated and kept our vaccinations up to date. But this summer has seen the rise to the FLiRT variant, which — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — has a mutation to the spike protein that allows it to bypass prior immunity. Combine this with the most recent vaccinations being 8-10 months ago and we are nicely set up for another COVID wave.
It wasn’t until I’d spent 24 hours sleeping in front of a space heater that it occurred to me I might have caught the new variant. I took a test and it showed positive within about a minute. I texted my dad and he phoned in a prescription for Paxlovid. Within the next two days, the other three members of my family would also test positive.
Paxlovid doesn’t cure COVID but what it does is throw a speedbump in front of it while your body ramps up its defenses. It allows the virus to build copies of itself but then breaks the process right at the end, which I find grimly satisfying (the third pill slow your liver’s roll in cleansing the medicine from your system). Within 24 hours of taxing Paxlovid, I felt better, especially in my lungs. Occasionally, my heart would randomly start racing for no reason, but that went away after a couple of days. Once the course had finished, I rebounded. No serious symptoms but tiredeness, persistent post-nasal drip and an annoying cough. Hopefully, that will ease up over the next week or two.
I consider myself lucky that I didn’t get hit until my body had built up some resistance through vaccination and Paxlovid had become abundant. This made the course much easier for me than it has been for most people. But I did find one thought circulating in my head all week:
To hell with China.
By that, I don’t mean the Chinese people or culture. I mean very specifically the government of China whose lies and cover-ups blocked any chance we had of containing this virus. That COVID is most likely zoonotic does not obviate their responsibility. They were warned about the wet markets. The early rumblings were extremely alarming but they downplayed it. They openly lied about its contagiousness and seriousness. And governments around the world, including our own, foolishly believed them.
The political battles we’ve had over COVID over the last four years feel like a distraction from that. Fights over masking, shutdowns, vaccines, etc. matter. Millions of lives were saved by COVID countermeasures and vaccines and millions of lives were needlessly sacrificed by the COVID liars and virus shills like the Great Barrington folks. But it bothers me that the PRC government has never been held to account for what they unleashed upon the world. In the end, it will be Xi’s biggest legacy.
[ThTh2] This will get one one-thousandth of the attention the accident did, but the reports on the cause of the East Palestine train derailment are coming out and they look very bad for Norfolk Southern. Expect many many lawsuits.
[ThTh3] Exercise won’t help you lose weight but it will improve your overall health. I’m living evidence of this: since beginning a new exercise program two years ago, I’ve … uh, well, I’ve gained weight. But I feel better. I don’t wake up and grumble down the stairs feeling like crap anymore. Here’s a good video explaining why this is:
[ThTh4] I sometimes worry about the information being gathered by DNA tests but stories like this make me think they’re mostly a good thing.
[ThTh5] A long deep dive into the concept of time.
[ThTh6] I’ve been vaguely tracking ongoing developments in nuclear technology. Rolls Royce is pushing their micro-reactor, which is showing some promise. The future of nuclear is quite bright and while micro-reactors may turn out to be vaporware, one of these breakthroughs is going to revolutionize the energy industry eventually.
[ThTh7] NASA, feeling the budget crunch, has cancelled a rover they already spent $450 million on. I find this decision to be a bit baffling, honestly. Especially as we’re discovering lunar features that could make a permanent base viable. In other depressing space news, NASA awarded the contract to de-orbit the ISS, which I also think is a mistake without something to replace it.
[ThTh8] So what has JWST been up to? How about imaging a pair of interacting galaxies known as the Penguin.
The distorted spiral galaxy at center, the Penguin, and the compact elliptical at left, the Egg, are locked in an active embrace. This near- and mid-infrared image combines data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), and marks the telescope’s second year of science. Webb’s view shows that their interaction is marked by a glow of scattered stars represented in blue. Known jointly as Arp 142, the galaxies made their first pass by one another between 25 and 75 million years ago, causing “fireworks,” or new star formation, in the Penguin. The galaxies are approximately the same mass, which is why one hasn’t consumed the other.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
ThTh1: yeah unfortunately COVID is still out there, even if people have really changed their practices about it. I overheard my colleague having to argue over the phone with his TA, telling her NOT to come in to teach lab with COVID. (My colleague’s wife is currently a cancer patient, and it’s not impossible that there are immune-suppressed students in the lab). The TAs argument was “there’s no longer any official policy!”
I later told my colleague that we are free to make official policy for OUR classes, so he could tell the TA his policy is “if you’re infectious, don’t come.”
Granted, pay is involved here for the TA. My class policy for my students is “e-mail me if you think you have something contagious* and I’ll excuse you for the day” I’ve never had a problem with any one pushing back
(*We have had Norovirus make the rounds here and while it’s arguably less serious than COVID, NO ONE wants Norovirus.)
But yeah, F the Chinese government’s lies, and F the people who politicized it to the point where now some cities are talking doing mask bans, which will be v. scary if H5N1 becomes a thing.Report
“I later told my colleague that we are free to make official policy for OUR classes, so he could tell the TA his policy is “if you’re infectious, don’t come.”
This is the thing. One lesson we SHOULD have taken from COVID, now that it’s endemic, is just plain “if you’re sick, stay home and rest and drink fluids and try to avoid infecting others. and go to the hospital if it gets bad.”
Now that vaccines that minimize the worst COVID outcomes for most people are freely available, COVID is just one more member of the flu/particularly-nasty-cold/RSV gang out there, and any one of those (or norovirus, or whatever) can be extremely harmful to someone immunocompromised, and just makes life miserable for the rest of us.
What specific MODEL of Viral Crud do you have *this* time? Who cares? Stay home, I’ll see you in a couple days when you feel better!Report
I’m confused by the China hate. The first definite case was December 1, 2019; Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome by late December, released a public health notice (with some misinformation, but it was very early and there’s no evidence that they were intentionally misleading rather than simply being ignorant), mandating masks in public, on December 31; the world was aware by January 8; and the American mainstream press was publishing articles by mid-January. Again, there was some misinformation in early Chinese public releases, particularly related to transmission, but the Chinese government had a public health advisory within 2 weeks of the sequencing, and had a massive response team building hospitals and staffing them within a few weeks of the first recognized case.
The worst thing the Chinese government probably did was delay the WHO’s public health emergency declaration until the end of January. That may have had an affect on some people’s travel, but really, by the point the WHO was trying to declare an emergency, it was probably too late, not because China had hidden anything, but because they hadn’t shut down all of Wuhan in December, which seems like an excusable thing given that the U.S. would almost certainly not have shut down an entire city or state either under those circumstances (or, as our own COVID response showed, under any circumstances). Then China did shut down Wuhan, and for about a year, their mortality rate went down in China outside of Wuhan, while we and the rest of the world continued to fumble (eventually China got hit hard, as we all know, because you can only contain a virus like that for so long, which is all the more reason not to blame China for it getting out in the first place).
Was China perfect in their response, then? No, not by any metric. Would any country have been? No. OK, maybe New Zealand. But the rest of the world would have fumbled at least as bad as China. I consider this to be just one more example of the irrational hatred for China among Americans, an irrationality that is increasingly pervades both parties’ China policies (did you hear Vance last night?), and which increasingly threatens the peace, economic stability, and even the climate of this country and the entire world. It’d be good if people cut it out.Report
“Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome by late December, released a public health notice (with some misinformation, but it was very early and there’s no evidence that they were intentionally misleading rather than simply being ignorant)”
In my understanding of events/timeline, this is true but does not contradict OP at all, which specifically says their beef is not with Chinese scientists or people but with the Chinese government. As I understand it, the Chinese scientists who did great, historical, lifesaving work in quickly getting COVID information out to the wider world did so IN SPITE OF, not with the assistance/support of, the Chinese government, who continued to try to tamp down on them for the usual reasons.
In this, they may be seen as similar to the American scientists who tried, with varying levels of success, to advise and assist US citizens on the pandemic while struggling to contend with a government that made, shall we say, various critical missteps for which I think it can also be fairly criticized.
I did a quick google to see if my understanding of things was still current and found this, which lines up with my understanding (that the Chinese scientists who did the right thing did so by going AROUND their government; and that they continue to pay the political price for their heroic actions.)
https://apnews.com/article/covid19-scientist-virus-sequence-protest-laboratory-eviction-b54e2a88610e813c9383833f2c9a2379Report
I hope you and your people are doing fine.Report
ThTh8: Looks like a hummingbird to me.Report