COVID Transmissions for 7-22-2020
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.
It has been 248 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.
Housekeeping note:
No in-depth today; just headlines.
As has become usual, glossary terms are bolded words with links to the running newsletter glossary.
If you like what you see—or what you might see in the future—tell others about it so the newsletter continues to grow:
Now, let’s talk COVID.
Herd immunity:
The Atlantic has a piece about how discussions of herd immunity also need to take into consideration the percentage of the population that is actually susceptible to the virus. It has been making the rounds and I think is a worthy read: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/herd-immunity-coronavirus/614035/
Severity biomarkers
Speaking of susceptibility, last week the JAMA network ran a story about different studies where researchers looked for biomarkers that might predict risk of severe COVID: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768113
They highlight a study from China, published in Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30627-9.pdf
This study is pretty cool, using gene expression patterns and machine learning to try and develop a way to profile patients who might be at risk for severe disease. Interestingly, a lot of genes involved in metabolic pathways turned up as potential markers for severe disease. Avoiding metabolic syndrome is more important than ever, I guess.
They also link a study from Europe that used high-throughput profiling to identify 27 potential severity markers: https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/pdf/S2405-4712(20)30197-6.pdf
This one mostly turned up markers of inflammation and injury—valuable to know, but not very surprising.
In case you think all of this is of only academic interest, NYU has developed a point-of-care app that can be used to assess patients’ risk of severe COVID-19 by using lessons learned from studies like these: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/lc/d0lc00373e#!divAbstract
More tools in the arsenal to fight this disease.
Treatment evidence:
The New York Times has a COVID treatment evidence tracker that is a useful resource for understanding the level of evidence available for various potential treatments: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-drugs-treatments.html
Infection underreporting/detection:
Apparently, due to large numbers of asymptomatic and subclinical infections, the CDC thinks that the rate of COVID-19 prevalence in a lot of regions in the US may be anywhere between 2 and 13 times as high as has been detected: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/health/coronavirus-infections-us.html
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Reading
Earlier in the pandemic I read Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which is an Eastern European-flavored, fairy-tale style story that tries to move in atypical directions. I had heard her read excerpts at a convention some years ago, but only got to the book recently. I’d recommend it.
Listening
We watched Hamilton last night, some of you may have heard about it.
Cooking
Rain check on the beet fritters—they’ll happen though.
Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue.
Also, I welcome any feedback on structure and content. I want this to be as useful as possible, and I can only make that happen with constructive comments.
This newsletter will contain mistakes. When you find them, tell me about them so that I can fix them. I would rather this newsletter be correct than protect my ego.
Though I can’t correct the emailed version after it has been sent, I do update the online post of the newsletter every time a mistake is brought to my attention.
Correction: There was an error by a factor of 10 in the thought experiment on risk-benefit for vaccines in yesterday’s issue. The correct numbers should have been 200 and 150, not 2000 and 1500. Thankfully this error applied to both sides of the hypothetical and thus the overall message remains the same. Thanks to ZH for catching this.
See you all next time.
Always,
JS