Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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THE COMING SURGE

If you observed the trends that COVID has produced in the past 2.5 years, it is possible to predict the near future. The latest variant of COVID called the Omicron variant will produce havoc during the winter around the northern states of the U.S. spiking around the December time frame.

HUMIDITY, HUMIDITY, HUMIDITY

If you look at the past few years, you will notice that there are two main surges in the U.S. each year. One in the winter and one in the summer. Now if you look a little closer, you might see that the winter surge is focused on the Norther states and the summer surge is focused more South. This is because of humidity levels. During the winter, people live and work in the northern states in highly efficient SEALED homes and offices. The fact that these are sealed very tight and heated very efficiently drives down the humidity levels towards ZERO.

Why is this important? COVID spreads when humidity levels are low (below 40 percent) and when humidity levels are high (above 60 percent). So it is possible to make a FUTURE prediction.

BUT THERE ARE TWO VARIABLES in play.

#1 Indoor humidity levels are controllable. All one needs is an indoor air humidifier to maintain the humidity levels. The lower the humidity, the rate of infection grows very substantially.

#2 Being vaccinated for COVID will not protect you. That is because the vaccines are designed to protect you from the INITIAL variant of the plague. NOT THE CURRENT VERSION CALLED OMICRON. Several people who were diligent about getting their shots have come down with COVID recently. The latest version Omicron is highly contagious. So what does that mean?
If you had the COVID vaccines YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE.
If you had one of the early versions of COVID, YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE.
The solution is to get the latest version of the COVID shots that protect against the OMICRON variant when it come available.

A SURGE IS COMING. WILL YOU BE PREPARED?

"Mild" Covid is somewhat of a misnomer. It only means no need to go to the hospital, not that you won't be miserable.

I agree. And am glad your outlook is good.

Sorry that happened to you, Quantum.

I hope you get back to your regular life really soon.

I tested positive for COVID last Friday using a home test. I started having symptoms like a cold a day before. It was pretty taxing on my system, as I had very low energy. Going up and down a flight of stairs took more than an hour to recover from. Five days in, it is almost done (except for the occasional phlegm from a cough) but I am still contagious to other. At least three or four more days of self isolation before I can retest and possibly to return back to my regular life again. I am glad I had the two shots and the booster of Pfizer before I caught it. It was likely picked up at an event that I went to that had too many people too close together. Sometimes you can be too lax in safety and pay the price for doing so.

People hospitalized with Covid-19 have doubled since early May as the even more transmissible omicron BA.5 subvariant has caused another wave of infection across the country, U.S. health officials said Tuesday.

But deaths from Covid still remain relatively low given the number of infections right now, the officials said. Dr. Ashish Jha, who coordinates the Biden administration’s Covid response, said deaths from the virus are not increasing at the same rate they once did due to the availability of vaccines and the antiviral treatment Paxlovid.

“Even in the face of BA.5, the tools we have continue to work. We are at a point in the pandemic where most Covid-19 deaths are preventable,” Jha told reporters during a pandemic update Tuesday. But he said the number of deaths still remains unacceptably high given the fact that the U.S. has vaccines and treatments to prevent the worst outcomes.

More than 16,600 total patients were hospitalized with Covid across the U.S. as of Saturday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, an average of more than 5,000 people have been admitted to the hospital with Covid every day compared with an average of more than 2,000 daily admissions for the week ended May 1, according to the CDC.

The U.S. is currently reporting an average of nearly 104,000 Covid infections per day as of Sunday which is almost double the number of reported cases at the start of May, according to the data. White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the reported infections are clearly an undercount because many people are using at-home tests that aren’t reflected in the data. Fauci said the real number of cases might be anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 new infections a day.

Deaths from the virus have remained relatively low at about 280 fatalities a day on average as of Sunday, according to CDC data. At the height of the winter omicron wave, an average of nearly 2,700 people were dying from Covid a day.

Fauci said BA.5 doesn’t appear to carry a great risk of severe disease compared with other omicron subvariants. But as cases increase due to its greater transmissibility, some people will end up in the hospital or ICU, he said.

People who caught the previous omicron variants, BA.1 and BA.2, are likely still at risk of infection from BA.4 and BA.5, according Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC. Walensky said the current omicron wave will likely play out differently around the country depending on how much immunity communities have from vaccination, boosting and prior infection.

The Biden administration is also discussing whether the broader population should be eligible for a second booster shot, though that decision ultimately rests with the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, Jha said. The FDA told the vaccine makers last month to change the formula in their shots to target the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, as well as the original virus strain that first emerged in Wuhan, China, ahead of a possible fall booster campaign.

U.S. health officials are worried the country faces another major surge in infection this fall as immunity from the vaccines wanes and people spend more time indoors to escape the colder weather. Jha said the U.S. has placed one order with Pfizer for 105 million doses of the updated vaccine. The U.S. is also in discussions with other companies for additional shots, he said.

“Obviously, that will not be enough for all Americans,” said Jha, who has repeatedly warned that the U.S. might have to ration vaccines to those who face the highest risk from the virus this fall if Congress does not approve more funding for the pandemic response.

Negotiations over a Covid funding package have been stalled for months over Republican opposition to the White House’s original $22.5 billion price tag. The Senate struck a bipartisan deal for $10 billion to buy vaccines and treatments, but that package has stalled as GOP lawmakers and some Democrats demand the Biden administration reimplement a pandemic-era public health law that deported asylum seekers and other migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

I wear a mask pretty stringently whenever I am in public. I was hoping people would adapt to mask wearing more often but ....doesnt seem to be that way. Keep protecting yourselves

The other problem with mask wearing is that you actually have to wear the mask when you are exposed. The threat is generally an indoor threat (not an outdoor threat). There are some exceptions to the rule (such as public transportation). Now here is the big problem with mask wearing. COVID is an INDOOR THREAT..

Oh...possibly bad news based upon my own recent trip through COVID:

1. The home test we used apparently did not detect our COVID for a few days. That is, we both tested negative and a day or two later tested positive...and we both strongly believe we were already infected when we got that initial negative test result.

2. After the quarantine/isolation period and after the symptoms were gone we both sometimes still got faint positive results on the home test. Our medical insurer's help line says the test was likely not reacting to COVID virus in our systems but rather COVID antigens...and the tests should get correct results after no more than 90 days.


And I have no idea how we are supposed to organize our lives if at first you get a negative result even though you are infected, and if after the infection you can't trust the test results for 90 days.

Yeah, a N95-equivalent mask will work well enough, along with eyewear.

Omicron, with BA.4 and BA.5, have sadly started utilizing TMPRSS2 again for spike processing (cleavage of the fusion protein S2 relies on TMPRSS2). That one mutation in the receptor-binding domain seems to have done it. Which probably exposes the S2 cleavage site upon ingress longer or something. It'll go back to the older organ tropism of replicating in the lungs well and not just the bronchi. They don't appear close to Delta in severity, but they might be more severe than the older Omicron mutants, along with an increase in the chance of Long COVID. Hamster pathogenicity models are contradictory here.

I dunno if the current subacute cough many are experiencing in the latest wave is due to this, but it might be.

Relatively new COVID-19 subvariant BA.5 takes some of Omicron’s worst traits—transmissibility and immune evasion—to a new level.

But it also combines them with a penchant for affecting the lungs reminiscent of the Delta variant that hit the U.S last summer and fall, according to two recent studies.

In the case of Delta, COVID tended to accumulate in and affect the lungs, potentially resulting in more severe disease. Until recently, a silver lining of Omicron has been its tendency to instead accumulate in the upper respiratory tract, causing symptoms more similar to a cold or the flu.

BA.5 is different, according to a study published June 10 on medRxiv, a Yale– and British Medical Journal–affiliated website that publishes studies not yet certified by peer review. Recent reports show BA.5 shifting back to the lower respiratory tract—at least in animal models—“with a potential increase in disease severity and infection within lung tissue,” researchers from Australia’s Kirby Institute wrote. They referenced another May preprint study that found BA.5 and close relative BA.4 replicate more efficiently in the alveoli of human lungs than so-called stealth Omicron, BA.2.

The scenario calls to mind the term Deltacron, which referred to a Delta-Omicron hybrid identified in the U.S. this spring that never took off. Back then, the term was used “prematurely,” Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote in a Sunday blog post on the studies.

Now, for BA.5, the term might be more appropriate, even though the subvariant isn’t a true hybrid.

“The ability to infect cells for BA.5 is more akin to Delta than the previous Omicron family of variants,” Topol wrote.

The Omicron subvariant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen,” Topol recently wrote. “It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility,” well beyond what has been seen before.

The jury is still out on whether current vaccines hold up against BA.5. But given that vaccines were 15% less effective against Omicron than they were against the Delta variant, even with a booster, “it would not be at all surprising to me to see further decline of protection against hospitalizations and deaths,” Topol wrote.