Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of December 27

My immediate family has planned a trip in early-mid January to see extended family outside the country (we live in the US). I've been thinking since early December or so that the smart thing to do would be not to go (don't want to bring Omicron with us and it's likely we could even catch it there as other countries begin to have their own waves). However, it's unclear that the members of my immediate family take the virus seriously enough to agree and cancel the trip entirely. I'd been wanting to talk it out with my therapist and make my peace with it before announcing my decision to my family, but of course... he tested positive for COVID and had to cancel our appointment. Not at all reassuring.

Omicron Has Landed

The ripple effect of having so many people get Covid and needing to isolate for 5, 7, or 10 days (recommendations are evolving) is happening as we speak: schools and daycares closing because not enough teachers, flights cancelled because not enough crew, restaurants shuttering because not enough staff, church/temples cancelling in-person services because the leaders are sick.

And most importantly, hospitals forced to limit access because so many staff can’t come in. Even today, several Boston-area Urgent Cares and testing centers closed early because they were over capacity. Hospitals are already cancelling any non-urgent surgery requiring admission. There aren’t enough blood donations so transplant surgeries are at risk. Many in-person clinics may need to close; some already have.

Also: Two Maryland hospitals declare ‘disaster’ as coronavirus cases rise

Just got my booster today - go get it if you can!

Welcome to Covid-19’s “junior year.” It’s not pretty.

That feeling of ever-dwindling resolve and malaise has had many names over the last 21 months: grief, burnout, “languishing,” trauma. Perhaps the most popular is “pandemic fatigue,” which describes the difficulty many well-intentioned individuals have had in keeping up safety precautions over long periods.

“People are especially exhausted because so much energy is spent on ‘what ifs’ and worrying,” says David Sbarra, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona. “There’s enough to worry about about the known-knowns that worrying about all the unknowns just takes a big toll on us after a while.”

As we face the latest “wave,” many are considering what effect this cumulative sorrow has had on us. Two years of data suggest, in short, bad things. The physical and psychic consequences of the Pandemic With No End are shaping up to be devastating, with few areas of our lives left untouched.

What I've learned over the course of this pandemic is that the government will not do the right thing for the people, even amid such great national devastation, and that many people are just straight-up crazy assholes. I don't have a rosy view of the future, even after the pandemic comes to its eventual end.

Price tag to vaccinate the world: $7 billion. And the U.S. is already coming up short.

Without additional funding, the officials said that USAID will fall behind in its commitments to help the Biden administration distribute hundreds of millions of U.S.-made doses to low- and middle-income countries by the middle of 2022. At the administration’s first Covid-19 summit with foreign representatives in September, U.S. officials noted it would take at least $7 billion in 2022 to ensure shots are administered across the globe.

They Were the Pandemic’s Perfect Victims

Nearly 18,000 more dialysis patients died in 2020 than would have been expected based on previous years. That staggering toll represents an increase of nearly 20% from 2019, when more than 96,000 patients on dialysis died, according to federal data released this month.

The loss led to an unprecedented outcome: The nation’s dialysis population shrank, the first decline since the U.S. began keeping detailed numbers nearly a half century ago.

They were COVID-19’s perfect victims.

“It can’t help but feel like a massive failure when we have such a catastrophic loss of patients,” said Dr. Michael Heung, a clinical professor of nephrology at the University of Michigan. “It speaks to just how bad this pandemic has been and how bad this disease is.”

Roche’s COVID-19 At-Home Test obtains EUA from FDA

The EUA has been granted through the company’s participation in Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) Independent Test Assessment Program (ITAP) of the National Institutes of Health(NIH). Through this programme, NIH aims to bring rapid tests to the over the counter (OTC) market.

Good News: https://foldingathome.org/2021/12/27/covid-moonshot-sprint-11/

Bad Complicated News: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/27/health/cdc-covid-quarantine-isolation-shortened-recommendation/index.html

Why antigen tests may still work well for Omicron, despite "reduced sensitivity" in lab studies

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that some antigen tests may have "reduced sensitivity" for Omicron, citing early data from the NIH's laboratory studies. Lower sensitivity means there might be a greater chance of missing traces of the virus and giving false negative results. However, NIH scientists caution that their lab finding is not evidence of a significant drop in the real-world performance of popular at-home tests, even in the "worst case scenario."

"A change in sensitivity in the laboratory is not a guarantee that there's a change in sensitivity from a clinical point of view. I would not recommend that people suddenly abandon their antigen tests," says Bruce Tromberg, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

[...]

Enough data to better measure whether that change is meaningfully affecting the "clinical" performance of antigen tests — their real-world effectiveness at detecting the virus in people — could be gathered within weeks, Tromberg guessed.