CORONAVIRUS INFO PROVIDED BY DR. JIM HARRIS – 3/21/2022

CORONAVIRUS INFO PROVIDED BY DR. JIM HARRIS – 3/20/2022

According to the above counts, Harrison County is about as safe as it has been in 2 years.

FROM THE NYT:

Another Covid Surge May Be Coming. Are We Ready for It?

SCATTER SHOOTING:

”…Case numbers are still dropping nationally, but BA.2 accounts for a growing proportion of those infections, rising to almost one-quarter of new cases last week. The subvariant is estimated to be 30 to 50 percent more contagious than the previous version of Omicron, BA.1.

“…we’ll see a wave in the U.S. sooner than what most people expect,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He said that it could come as soon as April, or perhaps later in the spring or the early summer….

“There are lots of moving parts,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s really difficult to disentangle which of these is driving any given wave….Fewer than half of Americans who have received primary vaccine doses have taken booster shots, putting the United States in a more precarious position. Even though case numbers are so low, nearly 1,200 Americans on average are dying each day from Covid — a rate far higher than in Western Europe, where older people tend to have received vaccines and boosters in higher numbers….As time passes, two doses become less effective at preventing Omicron-related hospitalizations, British estimates suggest, whereas a booster dose restores protection to considerably higher levels…Adding to the alarm in the United States, this week a number of wastewater testing sites [have] showed drastic increases in viral levels on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map…”

Disney Shanghai temporarily shuts down as Omicron surges in China.

”…China recorded 2,027 confirmed coronavirus cases on Sunday, with 1,947 local transmissions, including more than 1,000 in the hard-hit northeast province of Jilin, where the two Covid deaths were reported on Saturday. Jilin banned its 24 million residents from leaving the province or traveling between cities because of the surging case numbers there….”

(J. Harris: The infecting strain is the “Stealth” or BA.2 Omicron variant. The Chinese population will have little or no natural or vaccine acquired immunity to this strain, which is easily spread. It will be interesting and helpful to see if China’s isolation techniques work to control it. I’d bet not, but I hope I’m wrong.)

Researchers Deliberately Infected People With COVID—Here’s What They Learned

”…Since there are so many ethical concerns with challenge studies, the study was small, with only 36 participants chosen out of 26,000 volunteers. Among those exposed to the virus, only 18 developed COVID-19…Among those infected, researchers observed that the infection began extremely quickly—within two days of first exposure. Prior estimates of infection times ranged from five to six days from exposure…After becoming symptomatic, participants saw a spike in symptoms up to the fifth day of infection, at which point, virus counts began to fall. The virus was still detectable by a rapid test up to 12 days after symptom onset. With such a long period of viral presence, longer quarantine times may make sense. (Though, the way the virus works may change depending on the variant.)

HERE IS THE REAL PREPRINTED ARTICLE ITSELF:

Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 human challenge

”…36 volunteers aged 18-29 years without evidence of previous infection or vaccination were inoculated with 10 TCID50 of a wild-type virus (SARS-CoV-2/human/GBR/484861/2020) intranasally...There were no serious adverse events….”

AND LASTLY: