Corona-zona

  A couple of months ago, I blogged about the possibility of an endless wash-rinse-repeat cycle of COVID-19 infections. It's possible because of the rate at which the virus is mutating, the genetic space it has left to mutate, and the fact that the mutations seem to be in the direction of greater contagiousness and immune evasion. That is a depressing prospect even if there is no particular reason to fear reinfection except  inconvenience. But this week I have seen a couple of articles that paint a darker picture. One article  on a Canadian independent journalism site invoked the possibility of a "forever plague." They cited cases where people have been reinfected within 23 days .  A CNN story summarized findings of a  VA study  (preprint) looking at cases of reinfections in five million participants. It showed that  compared with those with just one Covid-19 infection, those with two or more documented infections had more than twice the risk of dyin...

For some time we have known that obesity elevates the risk of having a serious case COVID-19. The CDC says  "the risk of severe COVID-19 illness increases sharply with elevated BMI" (body mass index). New research, published in pre-print  (meaning it has not yet been reviewed), sheds light on why that is true: The virus attacks fat cells. This, in turn causes an inflammatory response. The more fat you have the bigger the response and the more severe disease you're likely to have. The relationship between fat and inflammation has been on scientists' radar for some time. They believe chronic low-grade inflammation caused by fat is responsible for the negative health outcomes associated with obesity, like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. The coronavirus seems to turbocharge this process. Scientists think  this ability to infect fat cells may also help the virus evade our immune response. In other words, fat may serve as something of a reservoir where the viru...

  Some anti-vaxxers are (finally) facing significant consequences of their actions. To date the most they have faced—if anything—is the inconvenience of being unable to attend some event or go inside some establishment. Now those who need transplants are being told they can't receive them unless they have been vaccinated. The American Society of Transplantation and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation released a joint statement saying that transplant patients, as well as their donors, families, and immediate contacts should be vaccinated. The reason is that transplant patients must take immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection of their transplants. This makes them more susceptible to COVID-19. It also suppresses their immune response to a post-transplant vaccination, making a before-the-fact vaccination the best hope for prevention. Needless to say, anti-vaxxers getting kicked off transplant lists take a dim view of this requirement. One woman in Color...

  Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is continuing his public illness campaign. This time he is banning schools from quarantining kids who have been exposed to COVID-19. He has already made it so schools can't require vaccinations and masks. Apparently, he feels that this did not do enough to promote public illness.  So Ducey has now sent a letter to schools saying they can't keep sick kids away, either. Y'know, so they can come in and transmit the more contagious Delta variant to all the unvaccinated, unmasked kids who haven't gotten it yet. Wow. I don't know what to say about this other than WTF? His behavior is unhinged and despicable. Normal governors do things to protect children. This one is doing the exact opposite, and with gusto.   To their credit, the schools are pushing back. They note that following guidance in Ducey's letter violates public health policy set by by the CDC, the Arizona Department of Health (i.e. Ducey's own agency), and the County heal...

  Everybody has heard that diabetes is a risk factor for COVID-19. Diabetics are not more likely to get the disease, but they are more likely to develop a serious case if they're infected. But some researchers are seeing evidence that the direction may go both ways. In other words, a COVID-19 infection may cause diabetes in previously unafflicted individuals.   One study Published in Nature in January, suggests there is a 50%-75% "excess burden" of diabetes on the healthcare system for people who have been in the ICU with COVID-19. The hypothesis is that COVID-19 may damage our insulin-producing cells. Some researchers are skeptical  of the idea that COVID-19 causes diabetes. The problem is that these studies are observational rather than experimental, and sometimes the observations disagree.  So for example, a multicenter regional study conducted in the United Kingdom and published in Diabetes Care in August showed that, compared with a typical, pre-pande...

  A  famous study done at Stanford in 1972 tried to find out if young children were able to forego an immediate reward in anticipation of a larger reward later. A researcher would show a kid a marshmallow and tell them something like "I'm going to leave for a while and leave this marshmallow with you. You can eat it if you want, but if it's still here when I get back, I will give you another marshmallow, so you can eat two." Videos of the experiments are hilarious, with many of the kids struggling to summon the willpower to not eat the marshmallow. Some succeed, and some cave-in and eat the treat. Follow-up studies years later showed that kids who were able to hold out had better outcomes in terms of education and other life outcomes (those findings have since come under question.) Falling infection numbers are presenting a marshmallow test of sorts to state governments, and they are failing spectacularly. On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott proudly  tweeted that...

I recently spoke with a friend who expressed concern about getting the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine because of the possibility of having an allergic reaction to it. Is this a reasonable concern? Not if you put it in the context of other things you do every day that carry a higher risk.   The latest  information from the CDC says that the rate of  anaphylaxis from the Pfizer vaccine is 6.2 per million, which works out to a 1 in 161,290 chance. For the Moderna vaccine the rate was even lower at 2.1 per million, which is 1 in 476,190. Other Risks The National Safety Council publishes a handy list of the risk of dying from various everyday activities. For some reason the latest data are from 2018, but it's probably safe to assume that the risks haven't changed a lot in three years. Here are some of the things in a given year that are more likely to kill you than experience  anaphylaxis from either vaccine: Dog attack: 1 in 118,776 Hornet/wasp/bee sting: 1 in 53,989 Gun acc...