Coronavirus Chronicles — What Else Are Scientists Up To?

The pandemic is affecting children in 99 different ways, few of them desirable. The world’s most brilliant minds endeavor to limit the damage, of which increasing childhood obesity is only one manifestation. The previous post described how the team called COVID Explained takes a very dim view of what the nation’s school authorities are doing. Specifically, many districts and states ignore the need for a flow of accurate and shared data to a central clearinghouse where, ideally, experts would be able to make some sense out of it. Instead, information about what’s going on in schools is not being released, and we are all the worse for that.

Atmospheric chemist Jose-Luis Jimenez of Colorado University Boulder created a “pilot tool” to help estimate the COVID-19 risk in different environments. A university publication says, “The Estimator calculates COVID-19 infection risk for a number of basic situations: college classrooms, choirs, taking a bus, being outdoors, participating in demonstrations. The model is downloadable and free, and users can tweak inputs…”, or, in other words, the details of their own particular situations.

The COVID Aerosole Transmission Estimator now has an online presence, although it is “still somewhat tricky for a non-expert to use.” Formatted as a spreadsheet, it is difficult to navigate, and its creators vehemently advise reading all the “Read Me!” parts before attempting to make anything happen.

Some bad news, maybe

Virologist Richard Randall “thinks that public health officials need to take a more nuanced view of how long the coronavirus lasts in the body,” writes Roxanne Khamsi. Randall thinks that a very tiny fraction of victims might remain infectious to others for months, and perhaps as long as a year. Although currently there is no study to back this up, his research into the prolonged shedding habits of other viruses seems to point to the possibility that it be so.

Kids are not exempt. It becomes increasingly apparent that infected children can be shockingly contagious, even when they show no symptoms of illness. And 20% or more of all victims fail to exhibit any symptoms.

People with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all are able to shed virus for many days, and so are patients who are immunocompromised or very ill. People who act as “superspreaders” are still very much being thought about, along with the contributing factors to “viral load.” The health-conscious public is having to learn a whole new vocabulary.

Mitchell Tsai summarizes the state of the art:

Essentially, the closer you are to someone infectious and the longer you’re in contact with them, the more likely you are to contract the virus, which helps explain why so much transmission occurs within households. Being indoors is worse, particularly in rooms without sufficient ventilation; the more air flow, the faster the virus gets diluted. Everyday face coverings reduce the amount of virus projected, but aren’t total blockades.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 Airborne Transmission Tool Available from CIRES,” Co-Labs.org, 08/07/20
Source: “The Mystery of Why Some People Keep Testing Positive for Covid-19,” Medium.com, 07/27/20
Source: “What you need to know about the coronavirus right now,” Reuters.com, 08/19/20
Source: “Seven months later, what we know about Covid-19 — and the pressing questions that remain,” Quora.com, 08/19/20
Image by Marco Verch/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Streets and the Schools

We do not know everything about how the SARS-CoV-2 organism travels from place to place, or how it chooses its new digs, or why some potential hosts are helpless before it, while others somehow manage to tell it to get lost. There are things that researchers are pragmatically or ethically unable to be at cause for. Some public events are important in secondary ways, as rough-hewn experiments that tell researchers things they need to know.

Massive protests were thought to be a prime enabler of community transmission of the virus, except it didn’t happen. For Healthline.com, Dana K. Cassell covered the subject and offered the following:

The reasons for the lack of transmission likely have to do with the protesters being outside in the wind and sun and most of them wearing masks. People who attend other outdoor events, such as going to the beach or a ball game, tend to share indoor facilities like bathrooms, shops, and restaurants.

The National Bureau of Economic Research issued a paper, saying,

We conclude that predictions of broad negative public health consequences of Black Lives Matter protests were far too narrowly conceived.

From Los Angeles, journalist Alex Mahadevan wrote,

We wanted to know whether officials had compiled more complete information since late June… The county’s health department, however, did not respond to multiple requests for the number of people who, when reached by contact tracers following up on positive COVID-19 cases, reported being at one of the protests within two weeks of starting to show symptoms.

Mahadevan went on to say that in San Diego, according to county officials, “no community outbreak so far had been traced to any outdoor activities, including those at beaches, parks and on trails, or protests…” Public health microbiologist Rodney Rohde, Ph.D., told the reporter he had seen no “peer-reviewed research linking outdoor protests (or really any major outdoor events) to the surge here in Texas.”

Some suggest that any increase in the number of coronavirus cases is due to the fact that people have no money, and take any kind of work they can get, increasing their exposure to COVID-19, and increasing the exposure of their children, who then go to school and either catch the virus or pass it around to others.

In this era, one thing many people notice is how the line between reality and satire is barely holding. Please enjoy Kara Baskin’s piece, “Your School District’s Reopening Survey.” She writes:

Students must be tested for COVID at the first sign of illness; please return your child to us in six weeks or when results come back, whichever comes first.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Why the Black Lives Matter Protests Didn’t Contribute to the COVID-19 Surge,” Healthline.com, 07/08/20
Source: “How much did protests contribute to Los Angeles’ COVID-19 surge?,” Poynter.org, 07/23/20
Source: “Your School District’s Reopening Survey,” McSweeneys.net, 08/05/20
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Weighing the Exigencies

In a recent and very comprehensive article for The Atlantic, authors Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer uttered an understatement so massive, it was darkly humorous:

The number of protests over the past week means that researchers will soon have a much better understanding of the risks of outdoor transmission.

A lot of people were very upset that protesters in Los Angeles and other cities hit the streets for a purpose they deemed to be of overwhelming importance. Even some people who agree with the principles called the protests irresponsible in terms of public health. But, as it turns out, the protests may not have caused any dramatic increase in the spread of COVID-19.

Journalist Alex Mahadevan spoke with Stanford University infectious disease researcher Erin Mordecai, who said,

Even before the protests started, L.A. had a problem. The county was already seeing increased growth in the epidemic, and that growth has been pretty consistent.

The thing that makes it hard to separate out the effects of the protests versus other factors, is a lot of states were reopening at the same time in late May. You had protests, you had Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, businesses starting to reopen.

Many protesters wore face coverings. In Seattle, out of those who were tested, very few showed positive. Minneapolis and Boston followed the same pattern. But there are “buts,” says journalist Robert Roy Britt. For instance, there was no way to verify if all the people tested had actually been in the midst of protest crowds. And the cities examined in his article do not share the exact same rules about masking, distancing, and other matters.

Some vindication

Meanwhile, data from many sources seemed to indicate that “superspreader events” happen indoors, in enclosed spaces, when people are in those spaces for long periods of time. In other words, under different conditions than a protest march. More than three weeks after the massive protests that involved hundreds of thousands of people all the activity did not seem to have affected the rate of new cases.

Apparently, “social distancing rules are not so important if people are outside and wear masks.” Buzzfeednews.com offered this:

What’s more, a new analysis based on cellphone tracking data suggests a surprising reason for the lack of protest-related spikes in COVID-19: In the cities with large protests, the wider population actually spent more time at home during the demonstrations.

Yasmin Tayag, who writes extensively about the novel coronavirus,  noted,

Experts have made it clear that it will be extremely difficult to peg any spike in cases to protests because the protests began around the same time that the country began reopening. The protests also began soon after Memorial Day, when many people relaxed their social distancing efforts.

At that point, the experts’ reasons for citing the difficulty were so theoretical and abstruse that one might almost dismiss the whole discussion; but the fact still remains, the predicted huge increase in cases due to mingling in the streets did not occur.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic,” TheAtlantic.com, 06/07/20
Source: “Recent Protests Don’t Seem to Be Causing Outbreaks,” Medium.com, 06/17/20
Source: “How much did protests contribute to Los Angeles’ COVID-19 surge?,” Poynter.org, 07/23/20
Source: “The Black Lives Matter Protests Have Taught Us More About The Coronavirus,” BuzzFeednews.com, 06/23/20
Source: “What We Know About Protests and New Coronavirus Cases,” Medium.com, 06/24/20
Image by Ted Eytan/CC BY-SA 2.0