I dunno, in retrospect im not convinced we had a chance of putting the genie back in bottle once it was out of China. Im my mind the primary purpose of behavioral changes was to give us time to figure out if this was smallpox and to get a vaccine made. I actually think given the nature of the virus that we did a pretty admirable job primarily due to extraordinary fast development/production of a novel vaccine. I mean it’s just stunning how big of a societal accomplishment that is. Clearly it’s better if people isolate more when sick/etc but I don’t think doing that better would have prevented this once it was in multiple countries
I think we possibly could have put the genie back in the bottle, but that’s not what I was referring to when I said it didn’t have to be this way.
Improving ventilation goes a long way. HEPA purifiers and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are very effective AND cost-effective when compared to the cost of treating illness, absence from work, etc.
Here’s a study showing that 6 air changes per hour reduced COVID transmission by 82% in a classroom setting.
You could get a HEPA purifier that does 5 air changes per hour in a 360 sqft space for ~$100 at Costco a few weeks ago. They’re currently sold out, but I’m sure the government could procure them even cheaper. We could have put them or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes in every public school classroom for next to nothing. About 50M students, average class size about 25, so ballpark 2 million classrooms in America. Call it $300 per classroom, and that’s $600M. And that’s not a recurring cost! The filters are way cheaper, you could probably run them for under $10M a year. Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are even cheaper.
Once it was in schools and evidence was showing reduced transmission, they’d start popping up in other places or we could mandate them the same way we regulate the quality of drinking water. I mean, if a bar or restaurant can spend < $1,000 on it up front and < $100 a year on it, we can’t find a tax cut to cover that up front cost? By God, we can find a tax cut for just about anything.
Better messaging around vaccines and maybe we’re looking at booster rates annually around 50% instead of 15%. That’s a further reduction.
Telling people to stay home when they’re sick instead of coming to work would provide further reduction.
Those three things might legitimately get us to a 90% reduction in cases (assuming the air filtration goes society-wide and not just in schools). The air quality does not change people’s daily life at all, and makes us all healthier. Staying home when sick improves people’s life experience.
There’s also the UV lights that can shoot across the top of the room that kill viruses, but I assume those are more cost prohibitive.
There are about 100 billion square feet of commercial space in the US. So that’s $278 billion, one time, to put those little HEPA filters across all of it. And that’s at retail costs for a small unit! It would probably be much cheaper at scale with bigger units/systems. That’s about 5% of what we spent on COVID stimulus.
Nobody even TALKS about this!
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I’m not all doom and gloom, this seems hopeful. Researchers at Rutgers found a portion of the spike protein that they targeted in mice and hamsters. The immune response did not wane over 12 months, and they hope even longer (that’s when they published, I think). They worked off the OG strain, but the response was just as good vs. Omicron and Delta. So there’s a chance they’ve got something that’s going to work against all variants that would only need to be taken once a year, at most - maybe just once, period.
Go human trials, go!
Yeah I completely agree it would be good to see more emphasis on passive/design issues to make buildings safer.
I think there has been more change than you think about staying home when sick/isolating/etc. At least once a week someone will call in saying hey I need to cancel, I have little bit a sore throat but just want to be safe. That literally never would happen beforehand. Or I took my second sick day off in the last 15 years and nobody gave me a hard time and I didn’t feel bad about it.
Beforehand at hospital had once been told don’t worry about the sick coverage plans, you’re going to either be here or be here anyway as a patient.
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This is an interesting study that seems to point to immunologic imprinting from common cold coronaviruses negatively impacting the immune system’s response to COVID-19 as the likely cause of long covid brain fog, and perhaps other long covid symptoms as well.
They have identified the specific coronaviruses that seem to cause the imprinting, which means in theory it would be possible to test whether you were at risk for it. I wonder how expensive it would be to find someone to do that?
This is a really interesting thread on immune imprinting from COVID infections and boosters. It’s long, but they believe that two bivalent boosters are needed to overcome immune imprinting from the OG boosters, or multiple Omicron infections to overcome immune imprinting from OG infections. They said after one boosting/infection, about 50% of the immune response is wasted but after two, it’s down to 20% wasted.
I’ll be curious in the future to see if this study and the previous one end up overlapping with regard to diminishing imprinting after repeat boosters and diminishing long covid issues. Of course, that could be a thing with each new variant.
This is the longest stretch of time I can remember without knowing or hearing about anyone who got covid. has been about 3 months now. there was a point where on any given day I knew a handful of people who’d pozzed.
They probably just aren’t testing anymore.
At least we got the monkey pox under control
I dunno, maybe, but a majority of the US population has had it now… what is the rate of reinfection? plus vaccines. I’m getting tested weekly and so is everyone around me and no one’s had it.
Booster rates are pretty low (like 17% of people got the bivalent booster), and the protection from reinfection wanes over time and as variants pop up. Supposedly XBB doesn’t always pop on the tests, either.
Are you testing weekly for work or for a specific reason? Or just so that if you pozz you can get Paxlovid?
Funny we were just talking about ventilation, and now the CDC announces new guidelines on ventilation to reduce the spread. They’re suggesting five air changes per hour, improved filters, purifiers, and UV air treatment. Almost exactly what I suggested, which isn’t patting myself on the back - anyone who read the studies knew what would achieve major reduction in risk.
Of course they can announce this now that the emergency is over because nobody can be forced to do it or held liable for not doing it. Had they announced this during the emergency phase, businesses could have been required to do it to maintain a safe workspace.
The CDC is a joke, their #1 priority is protecting corporate interests and the economy.
CO2 monitors aren’t expensive. Saw plenty of filters/fans that had them built in over in Europe.
This study finds that even in mild cases, 25% of people with COVID have visuoconstructive impairment four months later.
This sort of stuff not super exciting when they do so many different tests and everything came back normal except one of them. Now if someone else does same study and got same result would be intriguing but the more things you test for the more likely something will be significant for spurious reasons
Well we could think about some of the ways this might be measurable. We might see increases in traffic accidents (up significantly), workplace accidents (up a bit in 2021 we’ll see what 2022 does), and industrial accidents (anecdotally they seem to be happening a lot but I haven’t seen data).
Obviously that’s not proof of causation, but it makes it more likely this result is an accurate depiction of an issue than random statistical noise.
There has also been other research indicating weakened executive function post-covid, and we know brain fog is a thing. We know the virus has neurological impacts, as well.
This is a lot like the immune system issues. Studies need to be repeated, but when more illnesses seem to be spreading more easily as evidenced by outbreaks, it should lend extra credence to the studies.
The societal patterns lend some supporting evidence to studies that, if accurate, depict some dire consequences from letting covid rip.
anecdotally, people do seem collectively stupider.
Most long COVID does not improve much over two years. About 5% improves rapidly (mostly gone over 18-24 months), about 5% is persistent at high levels throughout the 2 year study with no sign of improvement, and about 90% slowly improves over time but only improves in severity by about 25% over the first two years.
Having a confirmed positive test correlates with the rapidly decreasing group, which makes me think treatment is really important to reduce not just risk of long COVID but severity/duration of you get it.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(23)00558-1/fulltext#%20