COVID Transmissions for 3-26-2021

Mar 26, 2021

Greetings from an undisclosed location in my new apartment. Good morning and welcome to COVID Transmissions.

It has been 494 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. I’m realizing now that there will be no issue of COVID Transmissions on day 496, which I was kind of looking forward to—496 is the last relatively small “perfect number,” a term for numbers whose proper divisors add up to the number itself. A simpler example is 6; 6 is divisible by 3, 2, and 1, and 3 + 2 + 1 = 6.

Due to Passover, there will be no COVID Transmissions until Tuesday of next week. Have a nice weekend!

As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

Keep COVID Transmissions growing by sharing it! Share the newsletter, not the virus. I love talking about science and explaining important concepts in human health, but I rely on all of you to grow the audience for this, which you can do by using this button here:

Share COVID Transmissions

Now, let’s talk COVID.

Global COVID-19 total surpasses 125 million cases

The headline is really the story. CIDRAP has coverage here, explaining the global regions that are driving case growth: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/global-covid-19-total-tops-125-million-hot-spot-deaths-climb

For once, the US is not on this list, but that can change. Europe is, though, as well as some other regions.

I’m sharing this story to note that wherever you may be, the pandemic is not over. Vaccines can help us end it, but only if we continue to be responsible and deploy them as quickly and effectively as possible.

Don’t take unnecessary risks! Stay safe. We can beat this thing, but we can’t get foolish about it now.

Protection from COVID-19, whether natural or vaccine-induced, is likely quite robust

I wanted to share two stories from The New York Times, both on the topic of who is protected from COVID-19, and for how long.

First, this story details cases of fully vaccinated people getting COVID-19, illustrating with anecdotes and with references to available data that such cases are likely to be extremely rare (but they do happen): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/health/covid-cases-vaccinated-people.html

I’m sharing this partially because when I worked on flu, I could have gotten rich if I charged people every time they told me “I got the flu vaccine and it gave me the flu” or “I still got the flu.” People are notoriously bad at knowing what they are sick with, and they are very often wrong about what disease they may have had. Influenza as a disease has become so diluted in public understanding that people often confuse it with a mild cold or other seasonal illness. I expect similar things may happen with COVID-19, and I anticipate hearing people who claim that despite vaccination, they still got COVID-19; or worse, that the vaccine gave them COVID-19. The former is possible but exceptionally rare, as the story says. The latter is impossible, since no vaccine contains competent virus or even could contain competent virus.

The odds that you personally know a vaccinated person who, despite vaccination, still became sick with COVID-19, are probably quite low. So keep this in mind when the stories start to come in.

On the other topic, there is the question of how long people who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 may be protected. Reinfection with the virus was a hot topic for a long time, particularly early on and then again when the first cases were documented. These cases also appear to be quite rare, however: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/health/coronavirus-reinfections.html

It seems from data related in that study that most people are protected from COVID-19 for at least six months after they recover—if not longer. Rare cases of reinfection do occur, but those reinfections are generally less severe because there is some immune memory in place from the prior infection. It does seem that symptomatic reinfection is more common in patients over 65, though.

This is all good news, really—and in line with the expectations I had when the first confirmed reinfection cases were reported widely. “Reinfection” just means getting the virus replicating in the host’s body again, so I expected that as we found more reinfections, we would see a profile where existing immune memory from the previous bout of COVID-19 made these second infections either asymptomatic or meaningfully milder than might have been expected.

That seems to have borne out, and implies that immunity against COVID-19 works the way we would want it to, protecting you against severe disease to some extent if you meet the pathogen again out in the world.

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Preparing for Passover

I’m still at it!

If you’re not Jewish, you may think of holidays as a time of celebration and relaxation. Ours usually involve celebration. Relaxation…less so.

You might have some questions or comments! Send them in. As several folks have figured out, you can also email me if you have a comment that you don’t want to share with the whole group.

Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue.

Also, let me know any other thoughts you might have about the newsletter. I’d like to make sure you’re getting what you want out of this.

Viral Transmissions

Discussion about this post