Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

Post Reply New Topic

With more and more people turning to social media for vital information, consolidation of information is also important. With maximum attention to metro cities fighting Covid, Tier II & III cities are often not in spotlight. TOI spoke to a group of volunteers updating vital information on Covid related needs in Kanpur on their dedicated page (@covid_kanpur). They say they all are constantly verifying information and even sending volunteers at the resource centre to give out verified leads. With the multitudinous help requests they receive everyday, these citizen volunteers are responding to messages even at 4am in the morning.

With the panic-stricken atmosphere, people are also missing out on important updates issued through govt. circulars in their respective cities. The sheer amount of information available online can be quite overwhelming for many. One person bridging the gap is Rohan Agarwal who has a dedicated Covid Relief (U.P.) page on Instagram and has created open for all guides with only verified information. He tells TOI that he consolidates and shares public orders/advisories/circulars issued by both State Government and Central Government from time to time, which people are not aware of. So, it is authentic and is useful for any person at any given time. He is also a part of 112-U.P. emergency service since four years and also debunks fake leads for plasma donation.

The Indians devoid of internet access and social media are also doing their bit to help those in distress. Chote Lal is a migrant worker in Aligarh who drives an e-rickshaw. He is ferrying patients to nearby hospitals free of cost in his humble sawari(vehicle). “Bohot bebasi hai charon or. Mujhse jitna ho pata hai insaniyat ke lie karta hun (So much devastation around me. I do whatever I can for the sake of humanity)”, he says.

Early in the pandemic, there was hope that the world would one day achieve herd immunity, the point when the coronavirus lacks enough hosts to spread easily. But over a year later, the virus is crushing India with a fearsome second wave and surging in countries from Asia to Latin America.

Experts now say it is changing too quickly, new more contagious variants are spreading too easily and vaccinations are happening too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

That means if the virus continues to run rampant through much of the world, it is well on its way to becoming endemic, an ever-present threat.

Virus variants are tearing through places where people gather in large numbers with few or no pandemic protocols, like wearing masks and distancing, according to Dr. David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

While the outbreak in India is capturing the most attention, Dr. Heymann said the pervasive reach of the virus means that the likelihood is growing that it will persist in most parts of the world.

As more people contract the virus, developing some level of immunity, and the pace of vaccinations accelerates, future outbreaks won’t be on the scale of those devastating India and Brazil, Dr. Heymann said. Smaller outbreaks that are less deadly but a constant threat should be expected, Dr. Heymann said.

“This is the natural progression of many infections we have in humans, whether it is tuberculosis or H.I.V.,” said Dr. Heymann, a former member of the Epidemiology Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a former senior official at the World Health Organization. “They have become endemic and we have learned to live with them and we learn how to do risk assessments and how to protect those we want to protect.”

Vaccines that are highly effective against Covid were developed rapidly, but global distribution has been plodding and unequal. As rich countries hoard vaccine doses, poorer countries face big logistical challenges to distributing the doses they manage to get and vaccine hesitancy is an issue everywhere. And experts warn the world is getting vaccinated too slowly for there to be much hope of ever eliminating the virus.

Only two countries have fully vaccinated more than half of their populations, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. They are Israel and the East African nation of the Seychelles, an archipelago with a population of fewer than 100,000. And just a handful of other countries have at least partially vaccinated nearly 50 percent or more, including Britain, tiny Bhutan, and the United States.

Less than 10 percent of India’s vast population is at least partly vaccinated, offering little check to its onslaught of infections.

In Africa, the figure is slightly more than 1 percent.

Still, public health experts say a relatively small number of countries, mostly island nations, have largely kept the virus under control and could continue keeping it at bay after vaccinating enough people.

While new daily cases have remained at near-world record levels, the number of deaths has dropped from a peak in February, going against the normal pattern of high cases followed eventually by high deaths. If that trendline continues, it could offer a glimmer of hope for a future scenario that scientists are rooting for: Even as the virus spreads and seems to be hurtling toward becoming endemic, it could become a less lethal threat that can be managed with vaccines that are updated periodically to protect against variants.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said on Sunday that he was open to relaxing indoor masking rules as more Americans are vaccinated against the virus, just two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention belatedly emphasized the danger of airborne transmission.

Dr. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, said that as vaccinations climb, “we do need to start being more liberal” in terms of rules for wearing masks indoors, though he noted that the nation was still averaging about 43,000 cases of the virus daily. “We’ve got to get it much, much lower than that,” he said.

Dr. Gottlieb said that relaxing indoor mask mandates now — “especially if you’re in environments where you know you have a high level of vaccination” — would give public health officials “the credibility to implement them” again in the fall or winter if cases surge.

In a separate interview on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jeffrey Zients, Mr. Biden’s Covid response coordinator, was somewhat more circumspect than Dr. Fauci when asked about Dr. Gottlieb’s comments.

Mr. Zients also suggested that instead of reaching herd immunity — the point when enough people are immune to the virus that it can no longer spread through the population — the goal should be to achieve some sense of normalcy by getting 70 percent of Americans immunized

Yankees manager Aaron Boone announced on Wednesday afternoon that the Yankees are now up to seven positive COVID-19 cases among the team’s coaching staff, with six of the individuals being asymptomatic.

Additionally, Gleyber Torres is being held out of the lineup “out of an abundance of caution” as more testing takes place and the Yankees await results.

Per Boone, Torres had the virus in December, has the antibodies, and has been vaccinated. Boone said he couldn’t comment on why Torres was the only player asked to be held out of the lineup as the joint committee continues to monitor testing results.

All seven members of the staff that tested positive are considered breakthrough cases, as all seven were fully vaccinated, including the two weeks following the final dose.

Wednesday’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays will still be played, as the Yankees have been in constant contact with the league office and joint committees over their testing results, but Boone said that the most frustrating part has been trying to grasp exactly how this has happened, given that all the individuals were fully vaccinated and following MLB protocols.

I don't know what's so "breakthrough" about it; they've been saying this whole time that the vaccines don't prevent you from catching or spreading the virus, they just lower the chances that you'll end up in the hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend masks for fully-vaccinated Americans indoors or outdoors, including in crowds, according to sweeping new guidance announced Thursday.

The new recommendation, which carves out exceptions for buses, planes, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters, will have significant implications for schools and businesses as the country begins to reopen.

It’s an about-face from guidance issued just 16 days earlier in which the CDC suggested masks should still be used indoors or in crowds even if people are fully immunized, which the CDC defines as two weeks after the final shot.

Children have been largely overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic; thankfully the majority of them get mild or even no symptoms if they catch the virus. Much of the discussion around the role of children in the pandemic has been about how they may spread the virus.

However, over time there has been a growing body of evidence that suggests that a proportion of children may develop long COVID, whether or not they had any symptoms when they actually contracted the virus.

A study in Italy looked at 129 children aged between six and 16 years, diagnosed with COVID‐19 between March and November 2020. Some 96 of them had symptoms of COVID-19 during the acute infection phase, while 33 had no symptoms at all but tested positive. The study found that 42.6 percent of the children still had symptoms more than 60 days post-infection. Symptoms like fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, insomnia, respiratory problems and palpitations were particularly frequent.

A similar case study was carried out in Sweden, focusing on a smaller group of five children aged from nine to 15. All five children had fatigue, dyspnoea (laboured breathing), heart palpitations or chest pain, and four had headaches, difficulties concentrating, muscle weakness, dizziness and sore throats six to eight months after the initial infection.

A recent report from the UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates that 12.9 per cent of UK children aged two to 11, and 14.5 per cent of children aged 12 to 16, still have symptoms five weeks after their initial infection with COVID-19. Almost 500,000 UK children have tested positive for COVID-19 since March 2020.

More research is needed but as the debate around vaccinating children against COVID-19 rages, it is important to acknowledge as part of that discussion the growing body of evidence that children appear to develop symptoms beyond the initial infection and these symptoms can be debilitating.

The lack of knowledge in this area is also a source of frustration for families who are presenting children to hospitals and GP surgeries with vague and varied symptoms and being turned away without adequate treatment and support.

Mix-and-Match COVID Vaccines Trigger Potent Immune Response

Preliminary results from a trial of more than 600 people are the first to show the benefits of combining different vaccines