Corona-zona

Hi all. Stepping out of retirement for a moment to say that the day has finally arrived. After four years of successfully avoiding COVID-19 infection I had a positive test yesterday. Symptoms are very mild—I've had worse colds. The provider at urgent care said almost all the cases they are seeing are the same. Mild symptoms may also be due to the fact that I had the original vaccine then the two boosters. All this time I thought I might be a NOVID —one of those people who never get the bug. But no, it must have been my assiduous mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk situations when things were bad. So here's double middle fingers to all the kooks who think masks don't work (I've not been wearing masks for months now). I don't know what variant I have but it's likely JN.1. It is said to be extraordinarily contagious and accounts for 60% of cases worldwide . It also tends to produce mild infections like the one I have.  This article claims that right now every...

  I've been a fan of wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2. I have blogged about it , and have included figures in the weekly summary for some time now. To review, the virus shows up in wastewater because when people are infected they shed virus in their feces, so it's present in wastewater systems and samples from those systems can be used to estimate population level spread. It's a great public health method because it's 100% anonymous and can cover large groups of people without needing them to do anything except what comes naturally. The CDC recently decided to try the technique to see if they could detect virus incoming on international flights. They tested 80 international flights incoming to JFK International Airport in New York. Guess what? They were able to detect virus in 81% of the samples! It worked! Well, we know we can detect virus in wastewater and planes contain wastewater. Why did we need  this study  to prove we can detect virus in airplane wastewate...

Worry seems to be fading over SARS-CoV-2. We can't have that! So nature has provided us with a new potential source of concern . It's called novel Langya henipavirus (LayV). It was discovered in China in 2018 but just now formally identified.  People who catch it have fever, fatigue, cough, loss of appetite and muscle aches. No deaths have been associated with it. As with monkeypox, I'm having trouble getting too excited about this one. At present the main transmission route seems to be from animals to humans. The main culprit is the shrew, with more than 25% of those tested showing up positive. So if you can avoid shrews—which I manage to do every single day—you're probably not going to catch it. They are not yet sure if it's possible for this to transmit the virus from humans to other humans. It's always possible it could evolve in that direction if we get too many human infections, but there have only been 35 reported so far. If this thing has been around sin...

  The United States—and to be fair the rest of the world, but I will focus on here—whiffed the pandemic. We ignored warnings and abandoned programs designed to give us what little preparedness that we had. We couldn't make enough PPE or medical equipment, or ramp-up testing when we needed it most. Our reward is almost a million people dead, and around 11 million people with "long COVID." There were plenty of people warning us that we were unprepared for this. Back in 2005, Bush wanted to invest in preparedness  (for a replay of the Spanish Flu), but Congress wouldn't listen. In 2014, Obama asked for money to prepare for an Ebola epidemic, cut Congress wouldn't listen. In 2015 Bill Gates did a TED talk about how we weren't ready for a pandemic, nobody listened. Then just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, the Trump administration undermined a federal-level pandemic unit that had been established. Now it's looking like deja vu all over again...

  One day after the post about deer getting COVID-19 , there's more news of cross-species transmission for us to worry about. There is a new type of coronavirus infecting humans, and it seems to be coming from dogs. It's a good story about medical detective work. Some health care workers in Haiti were not feeling well. Physicians thought they might have Zika virus, which circulates there. But tests turned up negative. So researchers exposed samples from the workers to a monkey cell culture, hoping if a virus were present it would infect the cells. It did, and genetic analysis of the cells showed the presence of a new kind of coronavirus, the eighth type known to infect humans. Turns out a nearly identical coronavirus was detected previously in Malaysia, where it had caused pneumonia in children. The fact that is popped up in both places so recently suggests it may have been circulating widely and scientists hadn't noticed it until now. Unlike deer, dogs do not avoid close ...