Interregnum, week 10

[petrea_mitchell]

The news is full of alarming reports about new, potentially more communicable virus variants this week. Probably they've been around for a while, and we're only just noticing them because viral genetic sequencing is not getting the resources it needs.

Oh well, we have bigger problems, like when it was announced that to speed up vaccinations, the entire national reserve of vaccines would be released, except then it turned out that there was no reserve.

The local news is warning of the dangers for local hospitals if people don't stick to wearing masks. Cases are ticking up anyway, as people decided to meet each other for Christmas and the more-contagious strains are probably spreading here too. And yet Oregon is still doing better than most of the US.

Comments

[joseph_teller]

We got the new UK variant here in Boston on Friday according to the news... via Logan Airport and a woman who flew from the UK to the US after testing negative, and was found positive when she got here in MA to catch her connecting flight to another state.

So Plague Plane and contact tracing system that is pretty useless since passengers, flight crew and all the people she came into contact at Logan airport etc. likely exposed to the more easily spread version.

And one of the things that is not in the news in the USA (to avoid panic? Or create conspiracy cover up claims later?) is that the new version hit Brazil recently and people that had already had the normal strain ARE getting infected by the new one.

And a report in one of the UK papers that 1 out of 8 people that are hospitalized to date with the normal version of the disease are dying within 6 months despite having been declared 'recovered'. Permanent Heart damage seems prevalent as the cause.