Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of August 23

University of Georgia professor resigns mid-class after student refuses to wear mask

Bernstein asked the student to pull her mask up to wear it correctly, but she said she “couldn’t breathe” and “had a really hard time breathing” with the cloth over her mouth and nose.

The 88-year-old psychology professor explained to the student that he could die from COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and age-related problems

Bernstein began teaching part-time at UGA in 1968 and became a full-time faculty member in 1971 while he continued research at Emory University’s Yerkes Primate Center until 1993.

Although he retired from UGA in 2011, he still taught as a part time retiree-rehire for many years and was asked by his former psychology department to return this year to teach two courses this semester. Now, Bernstein will not teach either.

I shared last week that a fully vaccinated family member of mine was hospitalized with COVID. They spent that week in the hospital and received remdesivir, and I'm happy to report that they are now out and back home. They are still on oxygen during nights but are through the worst of it.

My husband and I had let our guard down after we got vaccinated and as numbers fell in our area, but with rising numbers again and my family member's breakthrough infection hitting pretty close to home, we've gone back to taking major precautions, especially given that I'm back in contact with students, many of whom are likely unvaccinated.

Anecdotal and unverifiable, but here is a pretty grim discussion in /r/nursing on Reddit:

Uhh, are any of these unvaccinated patients in ICUs making it?

Donald Trump booed at Alabama rally after encouraging his supporters to get vaccinated against COVID-19, video shows... If even Donald gets booed when he suggests getting vaccinated, I think we are in for a very long haul.

I just got my first dose! My state allows for teenagers with autism and a few other conditions to vaccinate a few days earlier than other people my age.

The vaccine was applied more quickly than the syringe usage I usually see, which is that of blood collection. I am tempted to credit the added convenience to the anti-vaxxers being all "needle scary, also [conspiracy theory]", but realistically it's probably just because I don't remember last time I've been vaccinated.

I felt potentially vaccine-related side effects yesterday at night when I got what felt like a relatively heavy fever and I basically put myself under a whole bunch of clothing and cover (even for the relative cold it is where I live) to sleep in and it went from being almost enough to my skin while my body felt really hot to eventually sweating a whole lot and taking away half of the cover. All that being said, a relatively heavy fever is not something unusual or unfamiliar to most people. And that was basically the only side effect I felt, other than the region the vaccine was applied in becoming a bit hurtful to touch.

Doctor suggested I get tested yesterday after I came in complaining of ear and sinus pain. My throat has gotten worse, and I’ve started coughing, too. I should know the results either tonight or tomorrow morning. I was J&J vaccinated back in March.

Update: not COVID!

Denmark to lift all remaining Covid restrictions on 10 September

Denmark is to lift all its remaining Covid-19 restrictions by 10 September after the health ministry declared the virus “no longer a critical threat to society” because of the country’s high level of vaccination.

“The epidemic is under control, we have record vaccination levels,” the health minister, Magnus Heunicke, said in a statement on Friday. “That is why we can drop the special rules we had to introduce in the fight against Covid-19.”

He warned, however, that even if the country was “in a good place right now”, the epidemic was not over and the government would not hesitate to “act quickly if the pandemic once again threatens the essential functioning of society”.

The Guardian – 27th August 2021

New York City and New Jersey will require vaccines for all education staff, including teachers and principals

New York City will require every employee of the city’s Department of Education — including teachers, principals, custodians and all central office staff — to have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine by Sept. 27, without the option of instead submitting to weekly testing, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday.

Hours later, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced that all employees of public, private and parochial schools in his state must be fully inoculated by Oct. 18 or be tested once or twice a week for the coronavirus. He said the rules also apply to all state employees and all substitute teachers, who are already in short supply.

You ever want to be depressed, look to see if your local school board posts their meetings online, and see if they are having open discussions on whether or not they are mandating masks this year.

Are vaccines becoming less effective at preventing Covid infection? - Financial Times. Or you could read a Twitter thread by one of the authors. (There is a link at the end of the Twitter thread that seems to bypass the paywall.)

The short answer seems to be that nobody is sure what's causing effectiveness to decline. There are interesting studies, but multiple plausible hypotheses about how to interpret the data.

Also, your ideas about which vaccines are more effective may be out of date. Since they were first approved, it's become more unclear which ones are better. For example, there's a chart based on an Oxford study projecting that the AstraZeneca vaccine may be better than Pfizer after 4 months, but it's a projection, the error bars on the data they have are pretty wide, and conditions have changed in the meantime with the Delta variant.

There's some speculation about how differing mechanisms for each vaccine might plausibly result in their differing effectiveness.

FDA grants full approval to Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine

Here's hoping that this leads to a bunch of schools and businesses mandating vaccines, just like @kfwyre posted elsewhere in this topic.

Clamoring for ivermectin, some turn to a pro-Trump telemedicine website

twitter thread from the author giving a summary of the article

A lot of people have asked me this week: Where did this ivermectin obsession come from? Who could possibly benefit from it?

Most importantly, why did my antivaxx aunt start eating horse goo from the tractor store?

It’s complicated, but here are some answers.

Finally got my second shot and I feel awful, got fever this night and now all my muscles ache terribly. Hopefully it doesn't last too long...

From the CDC's Health Alert Network: Rapid Increase in Ivermectin Prescriptions and Reports of Severe Illness Associated with Use of Products Containing Ivermectin to Prevent or Treat COVID-19

In 2021, poison control centers across the U.S. received a three-fold increase in the number of calls for human exposures to ivermectin in January 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic baseline.

In July 2021, ivermectin calls have continued to sharply increase, to a five-fold increase from baseline. These reports are also associated with increased frequency of adverse effects and emergency department/hospital visits.

In some cases, people have ingested ivermectin-containing products purchased without a prescription, including topical formulations and veterinary products. Veterinary formulations intended for use in large animals such as horses, sheep, and cattle (e.g., “sheep drench,” injection formulations, and “pour-on” products for cattle) can be highly concentrated and result in overdoses when used by humans. Animal products may also contain inactive ingredients that have not been evaluated for use in humans. People who take inappropriately high doses of ivermectin above FDA-recommended dosing may experience toxic effects.

Clinical effects of ivermectin overdose include gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Overdoses are associated with hypotension and neurologic effects such as decreased consciousness, confusion, hallucinations, seizures, coma, and death. Ivermectin may potentiate the effects of other drugs that cause central nervous system depression such as benzodiazepines and barbiturates.

Delta Air Lines is raising health insurance premiums for unvaccinated employees by $200 a month to cover higher Covid costs

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian notified employees Wednesday that they will face $200 monthly increases on their health insurance premiums starting Nov. 1 if they aren't vaccinated against Covid-19, citing steep costs to cover employees who are hospitalized with the virus.

Unvaccinated employees will face other restrictions, including indoor masking effective immediately and weekly Covid-19 tests starting Sept. 12, the Atlanta-based airline said in announcing new Covid policies for employees.

[…]

"The average hospital stay for COVID-19 has cost Delta $50,000 per person," Bastian said in an employee memo. "This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company. In recent weeks since the rise of the B.1.617.2 variant, all Delta employees who have been hospitalized with COVID were not fully vaccinated."

[…]

Delta also said starting Sept. 30, "in compliance with state and local laws, COVID pay protection will only be provided to fully vaccinated individuals who are experiencing a breakthrough infection." Unvaccinated employees who contract Covid, without exemptions, will have to use their sick days after that.

CEO Bastian said that about 75% of Delta's roughly 75,000 employees are already vaccinated and that "aggressiveness of the [delta] variant means we need to get many more of our people vaccinated, and as close to 100 percent as possible."

Calls Grow to Discipline Doctors Spreading Virus Misinformation

Standing before a local school board in central Indiana this month, Dr. Daniel Stock, a physician in the state, issued a litany of false claims about the coronavirus. He proclaimed that the recent surge in cases showed that the vaccines were ineffective, that people were better off with a cocktail of drugs and supplements to prevent hospitalization from the virus, and that masks didn’t help prevent the spread of infection.

His appearance has since become one of the most-viewed videos of coronavirus misinformation. The videos — several versions are available online — have amassed nearly 100 million likes and shares on Facebook, 6.2 million views on Twitter, at least 2.8 million views on YouTube and over 940,000 video views on Instagram.

Dr. Stock joined physicians including Dr. Joseph Mercola and a group that calls itself America’s Frontline Doctors, in generating huge audiences for their bogus claims. The statements by them and others have contributed to vaccine hesitancy and a resistance to masks that have exacerbated the pandemic in the United States, public health officials say.

from reading some of the bullshit on /r/ivermectin I've learned that a lot of them believe in the "Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance" as a reliable source. it's a very professionally designed website that looks legitimate and trustworthy. the "get ivermectin" link being front-and-center makes it pretty clear what its real purpose is.

Johnson & Johnson booster shot prompts large increase in immune response, company says

People who received a booster six to eight months after their initial J&J shots saw antibodies increase nine-fold higher than 28 days after the first shot, Johnson & Johnson said.

The data comes from two Phase 2 studies conducted in the United States and Europe, the company said in a statement. Some of the 2,000 or so people in the studies got booster doses six months after their first doses of J&J's Janssen vaccine.

Hospitals in U.S. South Run Low on Oxygen Amid Covid, Storm

Hospitals in the Southeast are running low on oxygen, with the worst-hit left only 12 to 24 hours worth, said Premier Inc., a hospital-supply purchasing group.

[…]

Hospitals in Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia are all reaching dangerously low amounts of oxygen, with many relying on reserve tanks.

[…]

Florida hospitals began sounding the alarm on the oxygen shortages in early August, attributing the difficulties to a lack of drivers who are qualified to transport oxygen and restrictions around how long truck drivers can be on the road.

Mississippi has quarantined 15% of all K-12 students for COVID cases or exposures

About 15% of all Mississippi K-12 students have now been quarantined since the start of the year either for testing positive for COVID-19 or due to known exposures. That figure, based on new data from the Mississippi State Department of Health, includes 65,525 students who have been ordered to isolate in the weeks since classes began.

The latest report, which includes figures from 835 schools in 75 counties, shows that the state identified 5,763 new cases among students for the week of Aug. 16-20 and ordered 28,990 of them to quarantine for exposure, with both figures up since the prior week.