Tried starting to write this a few times, but there were always new developments. As I write, we now have to deal with Omicron (no Xi), but the authorities aren’t sure how bad it is. In the Greek alphabet we are getting close to Omega.
Bottom Line: Wear an N95 mask, get vaccinated, and minimize exposure to other people for protection in depth. Look for good ventilation if you’re indoors. Remember that nothing is 100% safe by itself or even combined. The best you can do is to try to get the odds in your favor.
No matter what silver linings the pandemic may have had, such as more webinars, nothing was worth all the lives lost and the permanent damage some survivors may have suffered via Long Covid or other damage.. That we have more Covid fatalities in 2021 than 2020 even with a vaccine is a tragedy:
Plus many more sources if you do a search.
I got my Pfizer vaccinations as soon as I was eligible. I had been skeptical because of the speed of the vaccine development, but my GO criteria were two weeks (kind of an optimistic number) of jabs without major side effects and over a million people vaccinated. These personal requirements were far exceeded. More importantly, when I learned that the virus was beginning to mutate, I knew that even risky vaccinations were vital to slowing down the rate of mutation. Unfortunately, not enough people have been vaccinated to slow the mutation rate. This also reduces the effectiveness of the vaccinations.
I have received my booster vaccination, which now appears to be a necessity and not a luxury, since the vaccination effectiveness appears to continuously drop:
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-vaccine-protection-fading
and
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-long-will-coronavirus-vaccine-last
How much is still being debated. However, the vaccine still appears to retain the ability to prevent serious illness (such as going to an ICU) even if one does get sick. The second reference above also notes that vaccination provides better protection than natural immunity after infection.
Early on in the pandemic it was noted that the Covid virus has proof reading error correction, so it was pretty stable, unlike the 1918 virus which was pretty good at mutating very quickly, up to 3 times faster. See:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01315-7
I would like to hear an explanation for the sudden increase in mutations. Was it just the weight of evolutionary survival pressure that overrode the proof reading or was it recombination? Anyway, the virus became very good at mutating, given the large pools of hosts in India, Brazil, Red States, and an increasing number of countries which thought they had the virus under control. The Olympics and Sturgis Rally sure didn’t help. BtW, I found that Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos series has a graphic explanation of proof reading in episode 2 or so.
Before it was apparent what a threat the Delta variant posed, some commentators were saying that it was terrible that the CDC had finally come around to endorsing masks since wearing a mask took away the incentive to get vaccinated. That sounds pretty ridiculous now that we know the Delta variant is many times more contagious than its predecessors. People also need to realize that nothing is 100%. Even if a vaccine is 95% effective, that means some vaccinated people are going to catch the virus. When you’re talking about millions of people vaccinated, that means a lot of so-called break-through cases. For the same reason, testing is not a good form of protection, as the former White House learned. Testing is of value for epidemiological statistics after the fact, but it is too inaccurate for effective screening. There have been cases of just one carrier starting a super spreader event.
The smallpox and measles vaccines are unique in how effective and long lasting they are. This New Zealand website may give you an idea of how vaccines vary in efficacy:
https://www.immune.org.nz/vaccines/efficiency-effectiveness
Now that it is pretty well accepted that the virus is spread by aerosols, an idea that was bitterly fought for the longest time by the WHO and the CDC, we know that 6’ physical separation and plastic shields don’t do much, although I like them for other reasons.
See:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html
Plus more if you search.
Wiping down everything and using hand sanitizer is nice but won’t give you much protection from the virus alone. Washing your hands is still a good idea for normal hygiene. Americans weren’t washing their hands enough before the pandemic.
So even after getting vaccinated, I use a N95 mask indoors and in crowded outdoor areas. The old wisdom was that it was unlikely to be infected outdoors. The Delta variant is so infectious it has caused a spreading event at an outdoor wedding reception with separation between the guests.
I wear my mask indoors and outdoors if there are clumps of people around me. N95 masks are now readily available and at least for a while American manufacturers were begging people to buy them. Some health care workers don’t have N95 masks due to the buying practices of their employers. A more general discussion of outdoor transmission:
https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2021/08/how-safe-outdoor-activities
I suspect that lockdowns aren’t necessary if everyone is well masked. Closing the parks and telling people to stay indoors was a bad idea. At least with the early versions of the virus, being outdoors was safer than indoors. In general, the big street demonstrations did not lead to outbreaks if people were masked and well spaced. That may not be true now, with Delta. In a world where people refuse to wear masks, lockdowns may be necessary if the level of infection gets bad enough.
Colleagues recommended the book Premonition (2021) by Michael Lewis. This book reads like a screenplay and leaves a lot of threads dangling, but it does try to tell how the pandemic got so bad. It explains why the CDC is only useful after the fact and how things could have been even worse. It emphasizes the importance of timing. Travel bans and shutdowns that come too late are useless, as we have seen. It does describe how some people started analyzing how the 1918 pandemic ended. In The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry a lot of the book describes the start of the pandemic, and even the development of American medicine leading up to that time, but very little is dedicated to analyzing and describing how the pandemic ended.
World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks is fiction but uncannily predicted how a pandemic would unfold if you substitute virus for zombies. Actually, the book was inspired by the first SARS outbreak (2003) and it only shares the title with the movie. I learned about this book from a Cambridge University The Naked Scientist podcast. Roughly the second half of the book is mainly entertainment, but the first half is eerie.
Brooks in a webinar also mentioned the National Response Framework :
National Response Framework (fema.gov)
Which is plan our government had for responding to a national emergency such as a pandemic. Too bad no one looked at it.
Currently reading The Coming Plague (1994) by Laurie Garrett based on a Max Brooks recommendation. Despite some nasty errors, this survey of recent outbreaks attempts to illustrate how the microbes are winning with our help.
Caltech, where I did my best to get kicked out of the grad school, had a series of webinars on Covid:
Caltech Webinars | Coronavirus Information
I especially like one by Richard Flagan on aerosols and masks:
Part of my contact with the world is via webinars and my surveillance cameras. I have no plans to fly until 2023 at the earliest, if airlines are still around, and I’m going to a theater anytime soon. I do occasionally go out to eat outdoors by myself and recently I have met some of my friends for a drink where there is outdoor seating. I am still regularly hitting the parks to get some exercise and constantly looking for ones that are new to me, both urban and wilderness. It’s amazing in my part of the world how some parks are so under-utilized, which is a good thing for me. To keep my mind off the pandemic, climate collapse, the threat of war, supply chain collapse, and the rising price of coffee, I am trying to catch up with webinar version of LA Astronomy on Tap:
Learning about the Cosmic Web and beer.
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