Tagged human nature

Robin in the Coal Mine

            “‘Michigan is an outlier that’s profound,’ said Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif. ‘This is a precedent in the country. It’s about plasticity, flexibility in responding, in being able to pivot.’ He added that tens of millions of doses were sitting unused across the country, and ‘in some states, you can’t even give them away…’ Vaccines could have been surged to Michigan weeks ago when signs of its new wave of infections were appearing, he said, like signs that are now showing up in other states, such as Minnesota. ‘We have this incredibly powerful tool, and we’re not using it…And it’s just an outright shame.’” The New York Times, April 13, 2021

            “Hi this is Michael Moore and this is an Emergency Podcast System episode… I appeal to my friends across this country and across this world: please stand for Michigan. Please come to our aid. The level of COVID cases has doubled, then it tripled, then it quadrupled…  We need to act immediately. This is a surge that’s out of control… Sadly the CDC has decided, the Biden administration has decided, not to give Michigan any more vaccines during this very sad turn of events. Now I think that’s wrong. And I think that we need to demand that the vaccine—the Pfizer vaccine that is made in Michigan, in Kalamazoo Michigan—that we get as many of these vaccines into as many arms as possible…to help put a stop to this UK variant. But if it gets ahead of the number of vaccinations…we may not catch up. And believe me there’s no Covid border around the state of Michigan. This…will happen where you live… So number one, the CDC needs to send more of the vaccine to Michigan, in hospitals, doctors, clinics, every pharmacy…This needs to happen in the next few days, not next week, not next month. The Governor of Michigan has to shut the state down…just for a little bit, this is not some long-term thing here this is just right now, immediately, to try and bring an end to this rapid, rapid epidemic in Michigan… Both are wrong; the CDC is wrong, the governor of Michigan is wrong. Let’s get this fixed right now. Please call your Congress people and your Senators at their switchboard on Capitol Hill 202-224-3121. Please contact the governors office…in Lansing, Michigan, and please go on WhiteHouse.gov and send a note to President Biden and ask him to please increase the amount of doses to the state of Michigan this week, right now, let’s not let this thing grow…it’s critical right now, this doesn’t need to happen… This just has to end. Everybody get your shot, everybody wear a mask, everybody keep your social distance and wash your hands. Be kind to each other. And politicians, the Governor, please, please…close it down just for a little bit. And the CDC: you’ve got to send us more vaccine…” Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Podcast #182, April 12, 2021

            “[Michigan] State Representative Steve Johnson, a Republican, said he doubted that many people would comply with a lockdown order. ‘For [Governor Whitmer] to try to continue those measures would have been political suicide,’ he said.” The New York Times, April 13, 2021

Dear Students,

The American Robin is the State Bird of Michigan, and it’s shown here singing its heart out on the graph of the new massive surge in the state. Michigan’s coal mines were tapped out decades ago, but there’s a saying about “the canary in the coal mine” that warns miners of toxic gas, not by singing but by dying.

Plenty of people in Michigan are doing that job for us in America, where we just keep digging ourselves deeper into a hole that the Michigan Robin is trying to warn us about. Of course, it’s just the Michigan population of the American Robin, just as the Michigan virus is part and parcel of good ol’ American SARS-CoV-2.

Michael Moore is right to say that Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer should ideally shut down the state again. But as that state legislator Steve Johnson points out, it would be political suicide.

If only that were the worst form of suicide it could be.

Last spring lockdowns led a Trumpist mob to stage an armed coup in the State Capitol building, a coup that actually succeeded in shutting down the legislature for several days. Obviously it was another robin in the coal mine, warning us of a similar coup attempt on our nation’s Capitol on January 6th. We have not seen the last of these.

But meanwhile, a group of deadly serious armed plotters were planning to kidnap Governor Whitmer, ending her administration, and some of them were planning to kill her. This planned assasination and coup was aborted by the FBI, but the next one may succeed. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have a duty to keep the people of Michigan safe, she still does.

But it’s pretty sickening when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky sits in the complete safety of her office in Washington and turns down a threatened and vulnerable Governor who is begging for vaccines. Walensky and President Biden have miserably failed the people of Michigan, and they will soon be failing much larger swaths of America, by insisting on a pigheaded policy of distributing vaccines exactly in proportion to a state’s population.

That means not only the Michigan surge but other state and regional surges to come will be ignored while millions of doses of vaccine sit unused. Biden and Walensky are already planning how to distribute internationally hundreds of millions of doses that will comprise a huge American surplus in a few weeks time.

Do I understand that vaccines take weeks to start working? Yes I do, and you know I do if you’ve been following what I’ve said all along about them. But that just means that Biden and Walensky failed Michigan weeks ago as well. Dr. Ashish Jha, one of the leading public health voices throughout the pandemic, tweeted on April 8, “This is very upsetting. Michigan is struggling. We need to be surging tests, vaccines to the state.” The idea that it is too late now is in my view absurd. Vaccines now could prevent millions of Michigan cases a few weeks down the road, even with one dose of a two-vaccine regimen.

What Walensky and others are saying to justify not doing this is a disgusting evasion. They are playing a political game. You can be that if this surge were in Texas or Florida they would not be withholding vaccine. Michigan is a blue state, like the color of the sky behind the robin. Biden’s people are afraid of seeming to favor Democrats, so they are letting Michigan and its Democratic Governor twist in the wind.

That’s the game—avoiding blame—instead of avoiding illness and death.

Walensky said, “The answer is not necessarily to give vaccine.” Not necessarily? What kind of mealy-mouthed answer is that? And, “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down.”

So, Dr. Walensky, is your boss going to send troops to protect Governor Whitmer and her family? Are you going to stand beside her in Lansing when she faces another anti-lockdown mob that wants to kill her?

Michael Moore understands the value of “everybody wear a mask…keep your distance, and wash your hands.” He is also, like Governor Whitmer, begging, begging for a surge of vaccines for Michigan.

Dr. Eric Topol, whose twitter feed has been a vital source of information for me and thousands of others throughout the pandemic, thoroughly understands and promotes the tried-and-true precautionary measures, and knows, as I do, that they would be a faster response to the Michigan crisis than additional vaccines would.

He also said about extra vaccines for Michigan, “We have this incredibly powerful tool, and we’re not using it…And it’s just an outright shame.”

Where Dr. Walensky or anyone else gets the idea that vaccines and masks are substitutes for each other is beyond me. I do think however that we are watching a political game run by Biden in his Michigan vaccine-refusal gambit, just as we so often watched Trump play as President.

The irony is that Trump’s political game worked against blue states like New York and Biden’s political game is working against the blue state of Michigan.

Good News

  1. Biden’s performance in rolling out the vaccination program nationally, despite my grave reservations expressed above, has more than met expectations. I criticized him for thinking at first that a million shots in arms a day was an achievement, at a time when experts were saying 3 million a day were needed. Biden deserves credit for getting to that number as an average, with maximums up to 4.6 million. We will have 200 million jabs by the end of Biden’s first 100 days, double his original goal.
  2. Biden and his associates frequently wear masks in public and preserve social distance, setting desperately needed examples for the American people—examples which, very happily, are the opposite of what we had for the previous first year of the pandemic. Biden takes frequent opportunities to encourage these measures as well as thinking about ways to address the looming problem of vaccine hesitancy.
  3. Data continue to emerge confirming the safety and effectiveness of the two mRNA vaccines, which represent a completely novel kind of vaccine science and one of the greatest achievements in the history of medical science. In addition to safety and efficacy, the mRNA technology afforded an unprecedented platform for speed in development of the original vaccines without compromising safety, and it will continue to provide a platform for speed in the relentless arms race against new variants of the virus, allowing for the development of variant-specific new vaccines and boosters with unprecedented speed. (Read the moving story of Dr. Kati Kariko, the brilliant and heroically self-sacrificing lab-science gypsy who helped lay the mRNA groundwork.)
  4. Just in the last few weeks some uncertainty has been removed about whether fully vaccinated people can contract, carry, and pass on the virus asymptomatically. The answer increasingly appears to be, for the most part, no, even with the much more transmissable and more virulent UK variant. Also, current protection against hospitalization and death, at least with the UK variant and the main one preceding it, appears to approach 100 percent.
  5. Monoclonal antibodies (aka passive vaccinations) have continued to prove themselves as useful if not magical. They still require intravenous infusions but are increasingly doable in outpatient settings, and they prevent early cases from progressing to hospitalization. Increasingly too, they are being introduced for people who have no symptoms but positive tests for active virus and even for people who just have known exposure. Vaccines are not much use in these situations. Research on intramuscular injection of monoclonals is under way, and if successful would greatly enhance the deployment of this lifesaving technology.

Bad News

  1. The Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine has been halted because of a blood clotting problem affecting about one in a million vaccinated people (6 in the US; one died and one is gravely ill). This is a similar adverse effect to that suspected with the AstraZeneca vaccine. In both cases the nature of the clotting disorder is unusual, and so unlikely to be part of the background clotting problems expectable in such a large population. The J&J patients were women of reproductive age, suggesting an immune system problem. The halt, if it has to continue, removes a single-dose vaccine from the toolkit, a loss for the US but a much more important loss for the world.
  2. 200 million doses in American arms by the end of April (Biden’s 100 days) means 100 million people fully vaccinated, approximately 30 percent of the US population, or less than half of the level needed for herd immunity. Even adding the immunity of people who’ve had the virus doesn’t get us near herd immunity, which is at best months away—without taking the newest variants into account, with their potential for resistance against immunity and vaccines.
  3. Vaccine hesitancy, particularly common among Republican men, will play an increasingly large role as more of the country is vaccinated. Children will not even begin to be vaccinated until late summer at the earliest. Herd immunity is not a slam-dunk; it will be an increasingly uphill slog as long as vaccine acceptance is politicized.
  4. I have become increasingly convinced, thanks to Michael Osterholm who along with a few others has been arguing this for months, that we should be using our vaccine doses very differently. Namely, we should administer twice as many first doses of the two-dose vaccines rather than insisting that people get a second dose within a few weeks of the first. As Osterholm cogently argues, using two doses to give two people first doses results in 80 percent protection for both, while giving two to one person and none to the second person results in an average of 47.5 percent protection, since the two-dose person has 95 percent protection and the other has zero. Mathematical models easily show that Osterholm’s strategy gets to herd immunity faster.
  5. Last, and most important, the pandemic is not an American problem or a developed world problem but a global one, including a general threat of global instability. We have not even begun to fight the global war against the virus. Herd immunity for the world will take years to achieve. You don’t need to care about humanity, just the long-term repercussions for you. The virus loves the global stage, which is its evolutionary playground. We already have growing numbers in our country of the South Africa variant (B.1.351) and the Brazil variant (P.1). What new variants will evolve in the slowly vaccinated populations of poor countries and bounce back to us in ’22 or ’23? Stay tuned.

Michigan, the robin in the coal mine, represents what much more of America will be facing in the months ahead. If the Biden administration does not drop its political games and surge vaccine supplies to states and regions that have surging virus—whether blue or red—we will be wasting time and vaccine doses and causing preventable deaths. The time may come soon to tally up the deaths cause by the Biden administration’s sometimes willful errors, just as we have done with Trump. They won’t be as many, but they will be substantial. Biden doesn’t get a pass on a bad decision because it followed two good ones.

Also, we need to look at the evidence for Osterholm’s claim that vaccinating twice as many people once would save many thousands of lives. We only found out recently how much protection one dose of the two-dose vaccines gives us. As Dr. Topol said, “It’s about plasticity, flexibility in responding, in being able to pivot.” New knowledge brings new responsibility.

Old knowledge helps too. Mask up. Keep your distance. Avoid gatherings. Use caution until we see what the new variants can do. This is not over, not even close.

Stay safe,

Dr. K

PS: Please don’t just rely on me. The most important recent addition I have is Dr. Michael Osterholm’s weekly podcast from CIDRAP, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota; it drops on Thursdays. He combines realistic assessments and warnings with uplifting stories about how people are finding light and small victories in the pandemic. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York Times Coronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter. I also recommend this COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which aggregates the data from dozens of mathematical models, and this integrative model based on machine learning. For an antidote to my gloom, check out the updates of Dr. Lucy McBride, who doesn’t see different facts but accentuates the positive.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarsie Rides Again

            “We are not driving this tiger, we are riding it… We are the one country in the world that’s opening up faster than ice melting in a sauna. It’s crazy… Vaccine’s coming. But it isn’t coming fast enough. It’s not. We’re not going to see a big expansion of vaccine availability for at least weeks yet. We will. Eventually we will. And I think this summer is going to be a really wonderful time that way. But we’re a ways off. B.1.1.7 is here, those numbers are beginning to rise, and I feel like it’s a déja-vu-all-over-again moment.” Michael Osterholm podcast, March 23, 2021  

            “When I first started at CDC about two months ago I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen. I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.” Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, March 29, 2021

            “I’m telling you right now…we are just beginning this surge, and denying it is not going to help us. We are walking into the mouth of this virus monster as if somehow we don’t know it’s here. And it is here. Now’s the time to do all the things we must do to slow down transmission, not open up, and we’ve got to get more vaccine out to more people.” Michael Osterholm on CNN, April 1, 2021

            “We’re not driving this tiger, remember, we’re riding it  … No other country in the world is loosening everything up—pretending the virus doesn’t exist any more. Nobody’s doing that… We are creating the perfect storm. We’ve got a bad, bad virus. We’ve got a lot of people yet who can still be infected despite the fact that vaccines are rising. And we’re opening up as if we’re done with the virus. It’s like dismissing gravity. ‘I don’t want to deal with gravity any more today. I’m done with it.’ It doesn’t work that way.” Michael Osterholm podcast, April 1, 2021

Dear Students,

Some of you may remember my exclusive interview with the SARS-CoV-2 virus (“Sarsie”), way back in early June. He talked a lot about his relationship with Uncle Charlie—who he said was advising him on how to evolve. I didn’t think Darwin would do that deliberately, but Sarsie clearly obeys the old man’s laws.

Actually, he wasn’t interested in being interviewed.

“Professor, shut up and press the record button. I don’t need your questions. I can talk to the students directly, and anyway they’re bored stiff with your doom and gloom. I’ll give it to them, like the new Prez says, straight from the shoulder. Okay, I don’t have a shoulder. Straight from the spike then.

“When I spoke to you back in June I was gearing up, had notched a few wins on the evolutionary scene, and was getting ready for my real triumphs. This column is the half-time show in my superspreader superbowl.

“What’s that? You don’t like the half-time show idea? How about top of the fifth inning? Okay, bottom of the fifth. The home team, your species, is scoring some runs with vaccines. In June they were barely a wisp of a hope. Nine months later, they’ve been born, quadruplets, and they’re starting to grow up.

“I know, you think it’s the seventh-inning stretch at least, or even the end-game. You think you’re about to start hitting them out of the park. Dream on. I’m looking at half the game ahead, not counting overtime. And I’m so confident, I’m about to give you my playbook. Only fair. Homo dumbellus needs a handicap.

“Let’s review the basics as Uncle Charlie set them out: Variation, adaptation, duplication, reproductive success. If you remember two words, make them the last two. You don’t even need the words, really, if you can’t spare the space in your Homo dumbellus brain. Just the letters.

      “RS.

      “It’s Darwin’s own version of Newton’s Law of Gravity. If Variant B reproduces faster than Variant A did, B rocks. If Variant C does even better, it’s Bye-Bye Baby B. And so on. Insanely simple. Not like the rocket science you need to escape gravity. Even a dumbellus can understand Uncle Charlie’s law. Heck, even a virus can.

      “In June I reviewed my early life. Years in the bat-cave spinning my wheels, then a variant that let me jump to you. Nice shot, but more of a bunt than a home run. Then a variant that let me jump from you to you, and I took off like, well, a bat out of Wuhan.

“Mutation, mutation, mutation. I love those little bloopers. Most do nothing. Some knock off the adventurous virus that blooped them. But every once in a while, and don’t forget I’m reproducing zillions of times a day—that’s an approximation—I get one of those happy typos that makes my day, week, month, or year.

“Mutation. Variation. Variants. Variants of Concern.

“My first big VoC after my breakout from Wuhan was one you didn’t even know about at the time. It was the D614G. Let me clue you in how to read that gobbledygook. The spike protein is a string of amino acids (aa’s), and this means a change in the 614th one from aspartate to glycine. Just a blooper in duplication.

“Now that wasn’t so painful was it?

“The explanation wasn’t, but the reality was. It made me much more infectious. G614 outcompeted D614 by binding better to the ACE2 receptor that folds me into your cells. I had greater fitness; that is, greater RS.

“Remember Italy and Spain in early 2020? Wildfire there, then all Europe, then New York—the Big Apple. With D614G I gave my regards to Broadway, and after that the world. Wuhan was just a memory. By June, when I last spoke to you, my darling G614 had swept the globe.

“Big spring surge, then a rest, a bigger summer surge, and after a little vacation in early fall, you took a deep breath and I got set for my giant winter surge. It went well for me. How did it go for you? Oh yeah, I remember. Homo dumbellus. Thick skulls, stupid habits, stupid leaders.

“Wow, did I take off in January. The graph itself looked like a rocket ship.

“But I didn’t rest on my laurels. Uncle Charlie wouldn’t have liked that, and I always want him to be proud of me. Turns out there were plenty of dumbelluses in England, so I fixed my fitness lens on Trafalgar Square. You know. The UK variant. B.1.1.7.

“If I squinted, I could see old Charlie nodding in his photo. He must have also liked that you started naming strains according to their evolutionary history. Couldn’t very well have named it according to one mutation. It had 23! 23 differences from the Wuhan original.

“Eight were in the spike protein, and three of those are a big deal: N501Y, (a blooper changing asparagine to tyrosine), P681H (proline to histidine), and two aa deletions at positions 69-70. The tyrosine at 501 made my spikes even better at binding ACE2, my key to your cell’s locks. The other two changes probably helped me fold myself through your cell membranes.

“You can see why I thought I saw Charlie swell with pride. I was mixin’ & matchin’! I was upping my game several ways at the same time. God I love evolution. My UK variant soon proved up to 70 percent more infectious, and the Brits, who had gotten D614G from their Southern European cousins, returned the favor as a Christmas present, sending the new B.1.1.7 back to Europe and now the world.

“Let’s take a break from the gobbledygook and note that this variant is the one you dumbelluses need to worry about right now. It’s dominant in Europe and soon will be in the US and much of the world; the only thing that will contain it other than vaccines, which work but are not moving fast enough to beat it, will be other souped-up versions of me that hold it to a standoff.

“By the way, the B.1.1.7 is also more lethal. Don’t think for a minute that I like that. Billions of my bros go into a hole in the ground every time they kill one of you—if you were still infectious when you died. Heck, what happens as soon as one of you stops breathing? No breathing, no aerosols, no RS.

“That’s why I evolved to be less virulent—less lethal—than my cousins MERS and SARS-1. I out-evolved them to put it mildly. Dumb as your species is, it gives me no pleasure to kill you. I want infections with few or no symptoms, especially in young people, whose restlessness and appetites whisk me around the world.

“Speaking of which, the world is welcoming me in more variants than one. The South African one, B.1.351, also has the N501Y blooper, but in combination with other changes in my recipe—K417T (lysine to threonine) and E484K (glutamate to lysine)—that make me resistant to your vaccines, even if Africans can get them. Africa is to me a vast unconquered world, an evolutionary opening of collossal proportions.

“Then of course Brazil, where the so-called leaders are as bad as yours, and they’re welcoming me to a banquet. My P.1 variant has 17 unique bloopers, including three that affect our binding to your receptors: K417T, E484K, and N501Y. The P.1 came out of the Amazon—famous for its diverse life forms, including me—and swept the country. But you don’t think my boys are going to stop at the Brazilian border, do you?

“E484K, aka the “Eeek” mutant, may be my jiu-jitsu trick to duck your immune systems and even vaccines. You can bet I’m going to make good use of the Eeek in the future. I’ve already popped up with it in Oregon independently, meaning—Uncle Charlie rocks—parallel evolution. If I can evolve that one pretty much anywhere, and it does turn out to nix your vaccines, well, Katie bar the door.

“Meanwhile, there’s a new New York variant, the B.1.526, which affects young people more, and a new two-form California variant, the B.1.427/B.1.429, with three spike protein mutations, including the novel L452R (leucine to arginine), that make it more contagious.

“Understand: most of your species hasn’t seen any version of me yet. I’m just getting started with them. See what I mean about half time? Bottom of the fifth? I still have to get to the majority of the species, and I will keep spreading faster than vaccines. I will also keep evolving. So you Americans beat the versions you have with the vaccines you have. But wait, you already have the Eeek!

“And something else: Do you think the bottom half of the world won’t be sending evolved versions of me back to you next year? The year after?

“Eventually you’ll fight me to a standoff with evolving vaccines. The smartest strains of your dumbellus species—the scientists—move fast enough to do that. But eradicate me? Forget it. Boosters for waning immunity, annual shots like my bro the flu, we can make a deal.

“A guy like me has a career trajectory. I could evolve toward even less virulence, become more like the common cold than the flu. Just bubbling up, year after year, not much damage but spreading just fine, bubbling and bubbling forever.

“So now you have my playbook and my retirement plan. We’ll get along eventually—after the pandemic game, my species against yours, is over. Which it isn’t even close to being yet. Like the man said, don’t dismiss Newton’s Laws, or Darwin’s. If it’s the bottom of the fifth, you, the home team, are up. Are you going to continue to let me strike you out? Or do you finally hit one out of the park?”

Maybe I should ask Sarsie to say what he really thinks.

He claims he doesn’t like to kill us, but he’s killed 550,000 of us in a year. We’re losing over a thousand a day and that is not declining; cases and hospitalizations are rising, and deaths will rise too.

It’s a fierce evolutionary process that can do that for one, two, three, and soon four American surges. Some biologists say that viruses aren’t really alive. Sarsie said last time, rather annoyed, “I’m alive and I’m eating you alive.”

Either way, his biological evolution has been amazing; cultural evolution is supposed to be faster, but our cultural evolution in response to him continues to lag way behind.

Stay safe,

Dr. K

PS: Please don’t just rely on me. The most important addition I have since my last update is Dr. Michael Osterholm’s weekly podcast from CIDRAP, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota; it drops on Thursdays. He combines realistic assessments and warnings with uplifting stories about how people are finding light and small victories in the pandemic. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York Times Coronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter. I also recommend this COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which aggregates the data from dozens of mathematical models, and this integrative model based on machine learning. For an antidote to my gloom, check out the updates of Dr. Lucy McBride, who doesn’t see different facts but accentuates the positive.

 

 

Arms Race

      “Please hear me clearly: at this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. Now is not the time to relax.” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, CNN, March 2, 2021

      “Dr. Walensky is right, and the reason she’s right is while things are way better than they were about a month and a half ago the level of infection in the country right now is the same as at the peak of the summer surge, so we’re not in great shape. And we have variants, and variants are starting to take over, and if they become dominant and we relax restrictions I think we can absolutely see a huge spike that will really lead to a lot more suffering… We have a high level of infection, we’ve got states easing restrictions, which they should not be doing at this moment, and we’ve got the variants that are circulating that are a lot more infectious. Put all that together and I can’t help but worry about where we’re going to be for the next couple months.” Dr. Ashish Jha, epidemiologist, Dean of the School of Public Health, Brown University, CNN, March 2, 2021

      “I have to congratulate this administration for what they have done…with the vaccines… But we also have to tell the story of what is still ahead of us. And at 2.9 to 3 million doses of vaccine a day, over the next 6 to 14 weeks, when this surge is likely to happen, is not really likely to take care of the problem at all… We still have a lot of high-risk people out there, and when this surge comes, they’re going to be highly vulnerable… The other thing we see right now is that every governor wants to open schools… and as a grandfather of five children I get it. But the problem is that if you look at Europe, the challenge we’re seeing right now is a lot of transmission in schools with this new variant… So we’re going to have some tough days ahead in the older population and the younger population with this new variant virus.” Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, on Meet the Press, March 7, 2021

      “The pandemic still remains a very serious situation.” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Monday, March 8, 2021, Politico.

Dear Students,

The US reportedly delivered 2.9 million vaccines into arms yesterday, far ahead of what Joe Biden initially promised and almost at the 3 million per day minimum that experts have recommended. However, the UK variant (B.1.1.1) is rapidly becoming the fastest spreading strain in the US, destined to account for at least 50 percent of new cases in Americans in the next few weeks. In Britain and Europe, this has been the threshold for new and very serious burdens on health care systems.

Right now, we Americans are feeling good. The holiday surge is over, and cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have come down an astounding 70 percent since their winter peaks. However, this is primarily the result of the mess we made by our behavior on the holidays. When we’ve been banging our head against the wall harder and harder, there is only so much credit we can take for feeling better when we stop.

But now cases and hospitalizations are plateauing at levels higher than the summer peak when the virus swept the south and west and the national surges scared the living daylights out of us. We are stabilizing at that way-high level—a convenient platform for the virus to take off in a new surge—and, right on cue, we are starting to bang our heads against the wall again, with premature openings and ending mask mandates in some states and lazy complacency in many others.

These foolhardy blunders can easily take us from the high plateau we are on into a fourth wave that will once again cause scores of thousands of needless deaths.

As the photo suggests, we are in an arms race between evolutionary changes in the spike protein—the virus’s arm for prying open our cells—and the human arms getting jabbed in the vaccination campaign. The virus is flooring its Darwinian gas pedal with new variants of concern (VoCs) in South Africa and Brazil, yes, but also New York and Oregon.

Our university is among those that have seen surges in student cases—in Emory’s case an unprecedented outbreak after a year of safe performance—due to Superbowl parties, fraternity and sorority pledging, and other activities the virus loves. So many opportunities to evolve! Now spring break is coming for many colleges, and—well, here we go again.

Good news

  1. The Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine was given its expected Emergency Use Authorization, putting it on a par legally with the mRNA vaccines. The J&J is an adenovirus carrying viral DNA and is stable for weeks at refrigerator temperatures, a tremendous boon for rollout—as is the fact that you only need one jab. It is substantially less effective than the mRNAs at preventing cases (72 vs. ~95 percent), but, like them, close to 100 percent effective at preventing severe cases and death. Initial rollout has been slow but will ramp up fast.
  2. Not vaccines, but other preventive measures (masks, social distancing, handwashing), along with the pass-through of the holiday surge, have brought cases and hospitalizations down more than 70 percent. Nursing homes, where the most vulnerable have lived and died of COVID all along, have declined even more—in their case largely due to priority vaccinations.
  3. Total vaccinations, mainly with mRNA vaccines, have been deployed more and more effectively, with 450 vaccination centers and thousands of volunteers across the country. We are almost at 3 million a day, and if we can keep that up or, preferably, increase it, we have a chance of flattening the curve of the fourth wave. If we keep up masking and other preventive measures, we have a chance to avoid it altogether and by the end of the year bend the current high plateau way down—if the vaccines provide long-term immunity and the new variants can’t evade them.
  4. Herd immunity through widespread vaccination—up to 85 percent is needed—can be achieved and life can return to something close to normal, with tremendous positive implications for the treatment of non-COVID illnesses, education, jobs, and mental health. Healing from this dreadful national trauma will be under way.
  5. Dr. Peter Hotez has lauded the vaccine rollout in India as having the potential to save the world from the virus—even while reminding us that the US will never be safe from it until it is controlled (not necessarily eliminated) worldwide.
  6. The CDC finally came out with guidelines for people who have been fully vaccinated. They can be indoors with small numbers of fully vaccinated people without masks, or with well-known low-risk people from one other household. They should not go to gatherings, eat indoors at restaurants, and the like.

Bad News

  1. Variants of Concern now include the UK/B.1.1.7 (mutation N501Y), which spreads 50 percent faster and is sweeping the US but is susceptible to existing vaccines; the South Africa/B.1.351(N501Y+K417N+E484K), which spreads faster and is less susceptible to vaccines; the Brazil/P.1 (N501Y+K417T+E484K), same; the new New York variant/B.1.526 (S477N+E484K), same; and the Oregon variant/B.1.1.7 (N501Y+E484K), same.
  2. Lets put this bad news in English. For each of these codes, the number in the middle represents the consecutuve position of the relevant mutation on the viral spike protein. The before and after capital letters represent the one-letter code for amino acids. Thus N501Y means the amino acid in position 501 has changed from arginine to tyrosine due to an underlying mutation (replication error) in the RNA triplet that specifies 501. Since 501 is in the binding domain of the spike protein, the mutation can and does make it easier for the virus to bind with and enter cells—thus increased transmissibility.
  3. The two mutations at position 417 (K→N →or K→T) as well as the change at 477 (S→N) also affect the spike binding domain. All can enhance transmissibility and all are popping up independently in different places. Also, these Variants of Concern involve amino acid substitutions that change the shape of the folded spike protein at least a little, and are therefore able to enter our cells or resist our antibodies more easily.
  4. Most concerning to scientists appears to be the E484K mutant, (glutamic acid → lysine at position 484). This mutant, present in 5 of the 6 new strains named above, makes it easier for the virus to evade our antibodies, thus undermining both natural and vaccinated immunity. Its nickname is the “Eek” mutation, and yes, it is that scary.
  5. Mutations occur constantly, and some of them are adaptive, so the virus evolves. To paraphrase an old song, it’s a mighty restless bug in a mighty restless land. Scientists have a huge deal of trouble figuring out which of the many mutations are silent, and which, like the ones above, matter for humans. On top of that, the mutations operate synergistically, for better or worse, when they appear in the same strain.
  6. Since we still do a woefully low amount of viral sequencing, and overall testing and tracing are low and/or declining, we are fighting the new variants in the dark without a flashlight. Our friends in vaccine manufacture and development start scrambling to invent booster shots for new variants as soon as they appear, but it’s a race against time, vaccine development vs. viral evolution.
  7. There have been disappointments on the clinical side this past week. Convalescent plasma in a metaanalysis was shown to have no benefit on any standard outcome measures. Fortunately, it is being replaced with monoclonal antibodies that work better if introduced early in the illness. Dexamethasone (a steroid) increases mortality if given early in the illness but remains confirmed as effective in advanced stages. The IL-6 inhibitor tocilicumab helps if given after dexamesthasone but is harmful if given without dexamethasone. Something similar is true of other IL-6 inhibitors.
  8. Standard views about children being less likely to be infected than adults may be due to testing bias, so they may be equally vulnerable. It still seems true that they don’t get as sick, but a new study finds that as high as 13 percent of children who are infected will suffer from long COVID. Dr. Daniel Griffin, who gives the clinical updates on the This Week in Virology podcast, calls this “a disaster.” Long COVID goes up by age to peak in the age period 35-49; overall it affects at least one in five people who get infected with COVID-19.

States are opening prematurely. Governor Abbott of Texas, still reeling from accusations that his negligence caused scores of death in the recent snowstorm, has decided to cause thousands more excess deaths from COVID by boldly opening Texas “100 percent.” The governors of Mississippi, Arizona, and other states are doing the same.

This failure of leadership is a step by step repeat of the mistakes that led to last summer’s and then this winter’s surge, needlessly killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and it will have similar consequences.

Such stupidity in leadership acts synergistically, like the evolving viral mutations, with the stupidity of ordinary Americans. If you have missed it, take a look at the photo on the left. It shows the good citizens of Boise, Idaho, ceremoniously burning masks outside the state Capitol. As with all ceremonies, this one expresses deeply held beliefs, and the adults are passing their beliefs on to their children with the ceremony.

As playwright Arthur Miller said, “The paranoia of stupidity is always the worst, since its fear of destruction by intelligence is reasonable.” These neighbors of ours have bad ideas, which they probably sense cannot hold up in the face of better ones, and since they are attached to their bad ideas, the possible loss of them makes them afraid.

Yet what can we do in the face of such stupidity except continue to meet it with the best intelligence we have? Meanwhile, as always, the stupidity of our fellow citizens, including leaders, puts us all at risk. Eek.

Stay safe. It won’t be too much longer, provided we aren’t stupid enough stretch it out again.

Dr. K

PS: Please don’t rely just on me. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York Times Coronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter. I also recommend this COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which aggregates the data from dozens of mathematical models, and this integrative model based on machine learning. For an antidote to my gloom, check out the updates of Dr. Lucy McBride, who doesn’t see different facts but accentuates the positive.

 

 

 

New Sheriff, New Bad Guys

      “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Prime Minister Winston Churchill, House of Commons, June 4, 1940

     “C’mon man, gimme a break!” President Joe Biden, January 21, 2021, answering a reporter who asked if a million vaccinations a day was enough

Dear Students,

Don’t get me wrong. I love Joe Biden. I supported him when most of my family and friends supported Elizabeth Warren—who by the way was the smartest person running for president, and had policy views most similar to mine—or Bernie, or others. Also, I didn’t think anyone as old as me should be president again. Yet I supported Biden because I was fairly sure that he had the best chance of winning, and because I was completely sure that he is an exceptionally good man. Although I did not say this to many people, I thought that he might be a great president.

Also, he is off to a good start. The new sheriff is laying down the law—on racism, LGBTQ rights, economic rescue, environmental protection, masking, social distancing, and vaccinations. But as far as the virus goes, he does not get a break from me, and no, it is not nearly enough.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a distinguished physician-virologist who is probably the most knowledgeable person about the pandemic after Dr. Fauci—but who can speak more freely than Fauci even now—wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on January 26th in which he described the new variants of the virus as a “looming catastrophe” that will bring us to 600,000 deaths by May. We need to deliver 500 million doses of vaccines—into Americans’ arms—to end community transmission. Do we want to wait 500 days? By that time the new variants will have run all over us. We need to do it by summer. Which is why Dr. Hotez is calling for 3 million vaccinations a day.

This means that we need more than two vaccines; a vast and rapid (warp-speed?) expansion of vaccination centers beyond those already planned; unprecedented invocation of the Defense Production Act; imaginative use of the armed forces, even beyond the National Guard; and innovative use of syringes and other equipment to minimize vaccine waste. A good account of the current vaccine development situation in terms of science is here, but we need more than science, we need wartime logistics.

We also need a new level of seriousness about masks, social distancing, and handwashing. If we don’t ramp up our use of these measures, we will surely face more lockdowns, with all the associated economic, social, family, educational, and psychological pain.

If you have studied with me, you recognize that we are in an evolutionary arms race with this virus. All infectious agents adapt and evolve. They evade our defenses—both vaccines and treatments. That’s why after almost four decades we don’t have a vaccine against HIV, which evolves even within one person. That’s why we need a new flu vaccine every year. That’s why every year, thousands die of TB and malaria because they are infected by strains that resist all known treatments.

If we don’t (culturally) adapt and evolve in the face of this new virus—or should I say these new viruses?—we will lose, and as always, black, brown, and Native American people will lose most. We will not win this arms race, this by far most deadly of all our wars, by asking for “a break.” We will only win by fighting the virus every hour of every day, in every place, in every way.

Good News

  1. The new sheriff is really, really different from the old one. His deputies can shoot straight and they know how to round up bad guys—bad viruses. The heads of the CDC, FDA, HHS and many other agencies responsible for fighting disease are superb people, not third-raters and sycophants like their predecessors; they are already speaking directly and frequently to the American people, without fear of censorship for delivering scientific truth. For the first time there is a national plan, and it is a fairly good plan. With it, we are building a shield against the virus that we never had before.
  2. There has been a significant decline in the past couple of weeks in the number of US cases and hospitalizations but not yet deaths, probably related to the end of the big holiday surge.
  3. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are working safely, and pretty soon a few million Americans will have approximately 95 percent protection (two weeks or so after their second dose). Preliminary data suggest that protection levels could be even higher in the community than they were in clinical trials.
  4. The Janssen/Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine will likely be approved (like the first two) for emergency use in the U.S., within a couple of weeks. Despite being less protective than its predecessors, it is more effective than the seasonal flu vaccine and easily passes the threshold of 50 percent protection set by health authorities. It hides the DNA—the gene—of a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein inside the Trojan horse of a cold virus disabled from reproducing. It has tremendous advantages: first, it only requires one shot; second, it does not require any specialized freezing or cooling equipment (DNA being much more stable than mRNA). These advantages will make it literally a lifesaver in rural America and in the developing world.
  5. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, despite some stumbles in the Phase III trials, is being used in the UK and was just approved by the European Union. It requires two doses but no special freezers, and will probably be added to the US vaccine arsenal in April. It is similar in principle to the J&J but uses a non-reproducing chimp adenovirus (instead of a human one) as the Trojan horse. The DNA is stable at higher temperatures, but it is still being worked out what the ideal doses would be.
  6. A monoclonal antibody drug (bamlanivimab, Eli Lilly) has shown 80 percent effectiveness in preventing infection in a randomized controlled trial in nursing home patients, and even greater effectiveness against deaths. This would have been tremendously important a few months ago, before we had vaccines, but now that we do, it’s not clear how the antibodies will be used—especially since they may interfere with vaccine effects.

Bad News

  1. The big bad news, and it is really bad, is that the virus has evolved new variants—new bad guys that will make the new sheriff’s job much harder. Of course, it has been evolving all along. A new paper, “Emergence of a Highly Fit SARS-CoV-2 Variant,” traces the first big leap the virus took last spring. As you know, “highly fit” in this context means spreading faster for more reproductive success. That first mutation was a single base change known as D614G that emerged in Southern Europe and by June was the dominant strain in the world.
  2. Viral evolution continued. In December a new “variant of concern” (B.1.1.7) was found in Southern England that contained multiple mutations and was determined to spread much faster and cause more severe disease. The mutations make it easier for a spike protein on the virus to combine with ACE2 receptors on human cells to gain entry. Hospitalizations doubled in the UK as the new variant became dominant there. More replication, more fitness, more dominance. It has been found in several US states and is predicted to be the dominant strain here by March. Fortunately, it does not evade already existing vaccines.
  3. A new South African variant (B.1.351) with different mutations of the spike protein—one of the mutations is on the presenting tip of the spike protein—is spreading rapidly and may soon threaten my old friends in Botswana. Two cases were found in South Carolina. Dr. Brannon Traxler, Interim Public Health director for the state, announced that they are independent of each other and have no travel history. She added cogently, “We know that viruses mutate to live and live to mutate.” Another independent case was found in Maryland. Given that we only sequence half of one percent of the virus samples taken in this country, it may already be everywhere. Like the English variant, it is more contagious and produces more severe cases, but unlike the English one, it also appears to be less responsive to existing vaccines.
  4. A new Brazilian variant (P.1) is worrying scientists. It is spreading explosively there and has been found in Minnesota. It may infect people who have had the disease before. It may or may not turn out to be implicated in the newly announced tragic COVID-19 deaths of nine children in the remote Amazonian villages of the indigenous Yanomami.
  5. There is no chance that one million vaccinations a day in the United States will stay ahead of the coming invasion of these new viral variants. The best, if not the only chance, is a great intensification of other preventive measures, the same that have been recommended all along. Unfortunately the behavioral trends seem to be going in the opposite direction.

On “Meet the Press” yesterday, top epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said, “The surge that is likely to occur with this new variant from England, is going to happen in the next 6 to 14 weeks. And if we see that happen—which my 45 years in the trenches tell us we will—we are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country… Imagine where we are, Chuck, right now. You and I are sitting on this beach where it’s seventy degrees, perfectly blue skies, gentle breeze, but I see that hurricane, Category 5 or higher, 450 miles offshore. And telling people to evacuate on that nice blue-sky day is going to be hard. But I can also tell you that hurricane’s coming.”

Dr. Nahib Bhadelia of Boston University’s School of Medicine, asked to comment on Osterholm’s metaphor, said we are in  “the eye of the storm,” not sitting on the beach with the storm hundreds of miles out. She means that the worst part of the storm so far—December and January—is deceptively slacking off. As the hurricane moves over us, the lull of the eye passes, and we get slammed with another monstrous storm surge in March and April.

Dr. Osterholm went on to say that we need “an audible”—American-footballese for a last-minute yell on the field that changes the plan. He thinks we need to get as many people as possible vaccinated once right now, and forget about the second dose until later. There is controversy about this, but Osterholm is really smart.

Recall what Dr. Traxler, South Carolina surgeon-turned-health official, said when she became the first American to announce the South African strain: “We know that viruses mutate to live and live to mutate.” She continued, ““That’s why it’s critical that we all continue to do our part by taking small actions that make a big difference. These include wearing our masks, staying at least six feet apart from others, avoiding large crowds, washing our hands, getting tested often, and when we can, getting vaccinated. These are the best tools for preventing the spread of the virus, no matter the strain.”

On December 15th, when I posted “Double Down or Double Deaths,” we had just crossed 300,000, but we were having the first vaccinations and hope was in the air. I said we could go to 600,000 if we don’t change our behavior. The IHME model now projects 582 thousand by May , 600 thousand taking the new variants into account. That’s the doubling. Considering we’re at 440,000 today, it’s not a stretch.  Depending on what we do and what the variants do, we could be anywhere between 600 and 2,400 daily deaths in May. The difference would be the equivalent of two 9-11’s every two days. And of course May will not be the end.

The new shield we got on January 20th is not nearly big enough or thick enough. And the new variants teach us that unless we think about protecting the developing world, protecting the whole world, which is the virus’s continuous playground, our shield will be full of holes.

Are you tired of the precautions? I am too. I want to hug my children and grandchildren so bad it hurts (and I don’t care that it’s ungrammatical). I want to see live theater. I want to eat out with my wife in any sort of restaurant, even McDonalds. I want to smile at people and see them smile back. I am tired of restricting myself for the benefit of myself, my community, and my country. I am, to use an  expression my mother might use, bone-tired. But I am not yet dead-tired. I will be dead-tired if and when the virus kills me.

And oh, by the way. In case you get to whisper in President Biden’s ear, give him this message from me: Mr. President, Sir, with all due respect, the next time a reporter asks you if a million vaccines a day is enough, do what you always said you would do: Level with us. Don’t say, ‘Gimme a break man.’ Say, ‘No, it’s not enough. We need three million a day at least, and  I promise you I will not rest until we have that. We are at war. We will fight this virus in the clinics and in the stadiums, we will fight in the pharmacies and supermarkets, we will fight on street corners and parking lots, we will fight in convention centers and on fair grounds, we will fight in the poor dense cities and in the bucolic countryside, we will fight with syringes and tests and masks and distancing; we will never surrender.’

Stay safe,

Dr. K

Hope and Death

John Berman, interviewing Dr. Sanjay Gupta, December 3, 2020:

            “But there’s every reason to think that what’s going to happen over the next three weeks isn’t just awful but I’m talking historically catastrophic I’m talking 1918 levels of pain for the next month and a half or so until the vaccine comes into play.”

            “I have been tracking exactly what you said very closely John to sort of see where are we in this country as compared to what is widely considered as the worst public health disaster in the history of the world hundred years ago or at least the last few hundred years and … we have better hospitalizations, ICUs, therapeutics, and an ambulance system and despite that, if you look at the numbers, we are tracking just as badly as back then which speaks to the fact that no matter how good we get scientifically and all the wonderful things that medicine can do, despite all that, human behavior is still sabotaging us…”

            “I was looking at the models again last night and the projected peak keeps moving but sometime in January —the issue really is that we may stay there and just plateau at that unacceptably high-level for a long period of time…The exponential growth is too high…90% of hospitals now are at capacity around the country. Where do you go? …if the entire country is on fire what is the escape hatch? It is becoming increasingly hard to find one”

            “I don’t know where this peaks at this point I mean this is starting to defy the models even the aggressive ones in terms of how bad things could get…I don’t know if viewers have noticed but we hardly ever present those worst case models what we are presenting to you is sort of the middle of the road sort of model they could be better if we actually started to employ mask mandates and talk about those five locations restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, houses of worship for example or it could be a lot worse as well and right now I’m not sure where we’re headed, but it’s very disheartening to hear that they’re still having this party at the White House, not just because of the White House but because then I get 100 emails from people saying hey how bad is it really? having a bunch of relatives over for the holidays will be OK right? That’s what I get all the time and I have to be the guy who says no it’s not and I hate to be the guy that says that, I enjoy a great holiday party as much as the next guy but this is not the year to do that.”

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm, leading epidemiologist, December 3, 2020:

            “Now the actual percentage of deaths as a number of people hospitalized is going to start going up because we can’t provide the same quality of care so you’ve got that factor at the same time you’ve also got the surging number of cases overall and that’s up to us that’s on us you know. We have a lot of power over this virus if we just stop swapping air with our friends, colleagues, and unknowns and if we don’t do that we’ll see the case numbers go up while the quality of medical care will actually go down because of the inability to provide adequately trained healthcare workers that’s the perfect storm and at that point I don’t know what this number could look like. It could obviously grow substantially.”

 

Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC Director, December 2, 2020:

            “December, January, and February are gonna be rough times. I actually believe they’re gonna be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation, largely because of the stress that it’s gonna put on our health care system.”

 

Dear Students,

It’s been almost six weeks since I’ve written an update, and the reason is I haven’t known how to approach the disaster we’re in, or to really add to what’s on the news. I have never been so proud of medical science or so ashamed of my country.

Yes, it’s been a rolling disaster since March but now it’s a quickly swelling disaster and we have failed in every possible way to do the simplest things we’ve been advised to do all along. They didn’t originate with me of course but as those of you who studied “Disease and Human Behavior” with me last spring, I have been issuing warnings about the new coronavirus since January. I have said the same things over and over again, along with others who know much more than I do about this, and all advice has been ignored.

Why repeat it yet again? Well, if a fraction of people who hear the message heed it, that is a few cases prevented and a few lives saved.

Flu pandemic of 1919 vs COVID-19

If you were in that class, you saw a version of this graph before. It was an old-fashioned looking but perfectly respectable summary of the three waves of mortality in the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which we studied. What I’ve done here is not an exact comparison, at all. These are mortality rates of major cities around the world. I’m superimposing points and projected points in the U.S. epidemic, which as you know I believe is most accurately drawn from hospitalizations, which you can see in the second chart. What is similar is that the 1918 pandemic started with a very serious wave, or two waves depending how you look at it, followed by the real killer wave, the worldwide tsunami. In the second chart you can see how our hospitalizations nationwide came in two waves, in different parts of the country.

COVID hospitalizations as of 12-4-20

The second chart ends with an exponential rise that has swept past the peaks in the first two waves and is going straight up. (The chart, shown on CNN December 4th, comes from The Covid Tracking Project and is almost identical to the chart shown on the same day in the machine-learning-based model of models that integrates many sources.)

As you know if you’ve read these updates before, I like to present good news and bad news. One part of the problem right now is that the bad news is worse than ever. How do I word things when I’ve given so many warnings before? It’s not that I’ve “cried wolf”—quite the opposite, every warning I’ve issued has tragically proved true.

No, it’s that as a writer I can’t figure out how progress from bad to terrible to horrible to disastrous to catastrophic without sounding like a repetitive jerk. And how am I supposed to find words to say that the next two months will be by far the worst we have had? And that the reason will be the same as it has been all along, or at least since we went from bad to worse back in March: Not the virus, but behavior—which viruses don’t have—human behavior.

Okay, nothing new. Yes, denial has gotten worse. Heroic nurses have described people dying of COVID-19 whose last words were that COVID-19 is a hoax. Trump rallies were held throughout the summer and early fall with near-zero precautions and each one was followed by a sharp spike in cases, roughly a doubling, in the communities where they were held, with hospitalizations and deaths close behind. Failure to follow guidelines caused predictable spikes after the Memorial Day weekend, the July Fourth weekend, the Labor Day weekend, and Halloween.

Oh, did I leave out Thanksgiving? No. We don’t have the data yet. It will come soon, and it will add a big surge of cases to what is already—let’s see, are we at catastrophic yet, or only disastrous? Hmm.

I know, we’re not the only ones. Canada had its Thanksgiving on October 12th, and since Canadians also didn’t follow guidelines, they are in their Thanksgiving surge now. But they never got, and will never get, to the levels we have been brought to by American Exceptionalism. We are the worst in the world. Japan is worried right now, but they have had fewer cases in the whole pandemic than we had yesterday!

What about the good news? I’ll get to it soon, but first I have to explain why good news is bad news. The good news is mainly about vaccines, and in my opinion they are going to be wonderful. Some of you have asked me what I think of them, and my answer is that collectively they represent one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. So how can they be bad news?

They can be bad news if they add to the denial of the pandemic—if they make people think it’s basically over, right when we’re starting the worst months of it—months during which the vaccine will do little or nothing to stop it. If you are reading this, it is overwhelmingly likely that you will not be able to get a vaccine until April, May, or later.

Depending on the models, we are talking about adding between two and three hundred thousand American deaths before that time, perhaps as much as doubling the total we have today. And that doesn’t take into account an unknown but undoubtedly large minority who will refuse the vaccines, or the potential for halting vaccinations in the unlikely event of a vaccine safety disaster. By the way, if any of the three vaccines I describe below were offered to me today, I would take it.

The Good News

  1. On November 9th the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration on an mRNA vaccine announced completion of their Phase III trials and reported an astounding 95 percent efficacy. The FDA will make a decision on December 10th about approving it, and if they say yes, it will be deployed to the highest-priority populations starting December 15th. (An mRNA vaccine consists of messenger RNA injected with the hope that it will enter cells that read the message, assembling a spike protein of the virus, which provokes your specific immune response.) This vaccine is already approved for use in the UK.
  2. On November 16th Moderna announced that its vaccine (also mRNA) completed Phase III trials with an efficacy of 94.5 percent. The FDA will decide on December 17th whether to approve it, and if the answer is yes it will start shipping on December 22nd.
  3. On November 23rd, the Astrazeneca-Oxford University collaboration completed Phase III trials and announced that its vaccine had on average 70 percent efficacy, easily crossing the threshold for FDA approval (50 percent) despite falling short of the two prior announcements. However, they made a mistake in one arm of their study and only gave half the usual first dose, giving a full dose for the second injection. This arm of the study had an efficacy of 90 percent. More important, their vaccine, unlike the first two, can be stored for 30 days at ordinary refrigerator temperatures. (Their vaccine uses an adenovirus vector genetically engineered to carry the message for a coronavirus spike protein and to be unable to reproduce itself; one possible explanation for the happy dosage mistake is that some people develop immunity to the adenovirus and therefore the booster shot doesn’t work as well—unless your first shot was a half-dose. Needless to say, this is under study.)

The Bad News

  1. Both of the marvelously efficacious mRNA vaccines have to be stored at ultra-low temperatures—the Pfizer at -70°C, the Moderna at -20—until almost ready to go into arms. Now I took a canister of liquid nitrogen (-195) with me to the Kalahari Desert to store blood samples for a study, so the temperatures themselves didn’t faze me. But I had a small number of samples and we need to store 700 million vaccine doses just to cover the US. Nothing remotely resembling the network of special freezers we’ll need exists in our country today.
  2. Aside from the thousands of freezers, an unprecedented distribution system will have to be created almost from scratch. I heard someone from Pfizer say that 20 freezer trucks are ready now to carry the vaccine where it’s needed, but that the eventual number of truckloads would be 40,000. The vaccines have to be shipped in perfect condition, and there has to be someone at the end of each journey qualified to inject it safely.
  3. Remember how many times we heard President Trump say that anyone who wants a COVID-19 test can get one? It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now, in fact testing capacity is declining when it should be many times what it is today. We will have a new president, one who takes science seriously, but science can only go so far against the formidable engineering, social, and political obstacles (much authority will devolve to the states) to doubly vaccinating 350 million Americans. You have to get the first dose, then come back three or four weeks later for the second, then wait a week for your immune system to really protect you. Varying estimates say 100 million Americans will be vaccinated by anywhere from February to July.
  4. Many, many Americans will refuse to be vaccinated, and it is uncertain whether we will ever have enough vaccine acceptance to achieve herd immunity.

Meanwhile, today is a day of milestones. There were 2,879 deaths yesterday, the highest number ever, expected to reach 3,000 a day soon. More than 100,000 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and hospitals throughout the country are nearing full capacity. It isn’t the number of ICU beds or even any beds. It’s the heroes who stand next to them.

Remember when front-line health care workers left Georgia and other safe places for New York, and then later when New Yorkers returned the favor? Nobody is going to leave anywhere for anywhere because every state will need them—and many more like them—right where they are. Death rates in those hospitals will go up as they are overwhelmed.

Those of you who are pre-med or pre-nursing, remember what you see over the next two months, because it will be catastrophic, and this won’t be your last pandemic. Watch the doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists despairing, even crying every day until they collapse from exhaustion or get the virus themselves, knowing all along that this didn’t have to happen.

Because guess what: We have had since Day 1 measures as effective as many vaccines. Masking. Social distancing. Handwashing. These could have prevented most of the 277,000 deaths we’ve had so far, the untold suffering of the families of those people, and the many, many thousands who thought they had easy cases but will end up paying a physical price throughout their lives.

The same measures can save scores of thousands of lives not lost yet but standing in line for their own coffins as they go to bars, hold parties, and “celebrate” the holidays. This will be the most tragic holiday season in all of American history.

I have never been so proud of medical science or so ashamed of my country.

Mask. Social distance. Wash your hands. This is the vaccine you have had all along, and its efficacy is very very high.

Dr. K

PS: Please don’t rely just on me. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York TimesCoronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter. With thanks to Prof. Craig Hadley, I also strongly recommend this COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which aggregates the data from dozens of mathematical models, and this integrative model based on machine learning, which has outperformed most others in its projections.

 

Sick Man, Sick Land

           “All of the information medical professionals want to know, all the things that are happening, vital signs, what his clinical exam looks like, what does he look like as a patient, are we treating the actual patient or are we treating a political ideology or a title or an office, and without that information at your disposal it’s hard to think about what are the processes going forward, how are we keeping this evidence based, how are we keeping this patient centered, are we doing the best we can to manage this actual human, this actual person‘s disease and if we are, we need to be transparent with it.” Dr. Myron Rolle, former NFL player, now a Neurosurgery Resident playing defense on the front lines of COVID-19, Massachusetts General Hospital, discussing the White House handling of Donald Trump’s case

            “Do you think these rallies like the White House event a few weeks ago are likely to become superspreader events?” Jake Tapper, CNN

            “Yes, I really do, and the virus is the constant here, it is very contagious. You put people together for long periods of time, longer than 15 minutes, closely clustered, maskless, those are the ingredients for a superspreader event. The challenge has been there are so many newly infected people every day in this country, contact tracing has basically become a futile task. How do you contact trace 50,000 people every day? It would be an entire sector of our society dedicated to doing that. But what we did and we have some reporting on this, we were able to go back to these cities, Tulsa you mentioned, Phoenix, and then Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in the beginning of August. you know after people are exposed to the time they get hospitalized is typically a few weeks, right?… It’s hard to actually contact trace back to the event, but hospitalizations is a truer measure. In Tulsa as you mentioned Herman Cain [former presidential candidate and Trump supporter] may have been exposed at that event and subsequently died. But we know hospitalizations went up three-fold a few weeks after Tulsa. We know in Phoenix hospitalizations were about 2000 per day at the time of that rally and went to 3000… Oshkosh—hospitalizations went up 20 percent within that time period after the rally so, again, cause and effect is always gonna be challenging to draw but look what happened in all the cities a few weeks after. People got sick. Hospitalizations went up. Was it directly related to the rallies? We may never know. But in places where the virus is already spreading like this? It’s really challenging.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN

            “The next 6 to 12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic.” Dr. Michael Osterholm, leading epidemiologist, Meet the Press, Sunday, 10/18

            “Its not like it’s a mystery anymore of how to beat this thing, it’s just a matter of implementing what we know.” Dr. Ashish Jha, leading epidemiologist, 10/19

 

Dear Students,

I am writing in a different mood from my usual fact-based, hyperlinked style. My mood, I have to say, has become more meditative, and even sad. I have not avoided politics completely in past updates, but now I have come to a point where it is impossible to discuss the health of Americans in this dangerous moment in history without taking a political stand. The behavior of our current president is severely damaging to the public’s health, more so every day.

Because of his arrogance and negligence, he himself was colonized by SARS-CoV2, as were his wife, his teenage son, and many of his closest associates. He invited the virus into his body in late September, either at the superspreader event celebrating his Supreme Court Justice pick on the 26th, or in the next few days of intensive, close, maskless debate practice.

His young aide Hope Hicks became ill on Thursday, October 1st, and was confirmed to have the virus too late to protect many, including the president. Whether she gave it to him or got it from him is impossible to say, because of consistent lying about the president’s frequency of testing, not to mention refusal to reveal the results. In the small hours as Thursday turned to Friday, it was announced that both he and the First Lady had tested positive.

Friday afternoon he was ‘coptered to Walter Reed Army Hospital and admitted. After a number of days of concealment and lying by his doctors—both of which are still going on—we learned that he had had a significant fever, that his blood oxygen had been below normal on at least two tests, although no numbers were offered except that it was below 94 and above the low 80s. Since he had serious lung symptoms and signs, it is inconceivable that he did not get a chest X-ray, a chest CT, and possibly other lung studies; however, the results of those studies were not shared with us.

Similarly, we were never told the reason for his impromptu visit to Walter Reed Hospital a year ago. Lies were told first about it being an early start to his annual physical, then about it being a follow-up. He and his doctor officially denied that he had been evaluated for transient ischemic attacks (temporary strokes), but he bragged about his performance on a cognitive test with a very low ceiling, meaning it was only intended to rule out big brain problems such as stroke and dementia.

The first medical information we got about him was a letter from his personal physician saying he would be the healthiest man ever to become president. Obviously that physician could not have made the comparison, and he admitted that Trump had dictated the letter to him. Later we found out that he had a cholesterol in the 260s, since brought down. He is also reported to have a common cardiac problem, which based on his cholesterol levels in the past and on his obesity, would most likely be coronary artery calcification.

That’s about all we know of his underlying conditions (other than age and body mass index) relevant to his recent case of COVID-19. Based on the medications he was given, it is widely agreed that his doctors at Walter Reed—some of the best in the world—were very concerned. The main medications were:

  1. An experimental antibody medication that the president refers to as Regeneron—the name of the company that makes it, since the drug does not yet have a name;
  2. Remdesivir, an antiviral medication that many (including me) have thought was very promising but which a new WHO study (published since Mr. Trump got it) has cast doubt on;
  3. Dexamethasone, a standard steroid treatment for inflammation in many diseases, proven to save lives in advanced COVID-19.

Mr. Trump got all three treatments within the first day or two of his symptomatic illness, very unusual for dexamethasone. His doctors were either extremely worried from the outset or they were giving him VIP treatment, not always beneficial to the VIP.

He was also given supplemental oxygen, only instituted because of low blood oxygen and/or difficulty breathing, and fever-lowering medications, including dexamethasone. We never heard anyone on his medical team mention those medications when they repeatedly announced that he was fever-free.

He was released from the hospital Monday evening. He did not speak spontaneously but he had made a few brief videos for public consumption. After climbing the White House steps he removed his mask, appeared to have difficulty breathing, and did not speak.

If his course of dexamethasone was usual, it would have lasted ten to fourteen days. We have not been told if or when his dexamethasone was tapered to zero. If he was indeed tapered and has not been taking it for the past week or so, then it is quite possible he had a mild case, less serious than most who are hospitalized.

Because so little is known about the monoclonal antibodies he took, we can’t be sure when his own antibody response would be expected to kick in, but 21-25 days is a reasonable expectation after the Regeneron antibodies clear. We do not know if or when he stopped taking dexamethasone.

These questions are important for two reasons: 1. Is he immune or even partly immune to reinfection? 2. Is he still potentially subject to self-attack by his own immune system, which happens in so many COVID-19 patients—including, probably, his wife, who yesterday dropped out of her first campaign event in months, reporting a persistent cough.

COVID-19 is a two- or three- phase disease in the serious cases. First, the virus does its nasty work on your lungs, but it usually remains in the cells lining the lungs and bronchi. In most cases it does not enter the bloodstream or affect other organs on its own. It tends to stay where you breathed it in. It can kill you in this phase, but often doesn’t.

Phase 2 is your immune system response. This produces an attack on the walls of blood vessels everywhere in your body. This, your own body’s response, is usually what damages your heart, kidneys, brain, blood vessels, and other organs. This is very often the cause of death, including in children. By the way, the same was true of the influenza of 1918-19, although most deaths were in young adults, who are relatively protected from COVID-19 death.

Phase 3, which we are learning occurs in more people than we thought, is what has been called the “long haul.” Long haulers have symptoms, probably due to the lasting effects of inflammation, for months after recovering from the main part of the illness. The virus is too new for us to know whether these months may turn into years.

When Former Governor Chris Christie, whose COVID-19 was almost certainly contracted while coaching the president for the debate, left the hospital after a more serious case than Mr. Trump’s, he said loudly and clearly that he had been wrong, that he had let his guard down, that he had underestimated the virus. He also said that everyone should take the virus very very seriously.

Mr. Trump said the opposite. He told us not to be afraid of the virus, that he had beaten it and we could too; we should refuse to let it dominate our lives. He said that he had been cured by “Regeneron,” a completely experimental treatment no ordinary patient can get. There is no cure for COVID-19 as yet. In the days that followed his discharge, Mr. Trump showed what are very widely recognized mental symptoms caused by dexamethasone: strangely elevated mood, disorganized thought processes, and hypomania.

He soon returned to his most intense level of campaigning, making long speeches without difficulty breathing. The most likely explanation for this recovery is that he simply dodged the bullet—he had a mild, short case irrespective of his medications. The second is that he really was greatly helped by the trio of medicines he was given: the cocktail of two antibodies given to very few people in the world; the Remdesivir; and the dexamethasone started exceptionally early in his illness. As far as we know, no one has ever been given this combination of drugs with this timing.

A third, and I think distant, possibility, is that he is not yet over it. It is only 19 days since he entered the hospital. His treatment may have postponed his Phase 2, the autoimmune attack, rather than putting it permanently aside.

Mr. Trump’s public remarks about the virus since he had it are something like a worst case scenario for almost every public health expert and every family mourning a COVID death. He has stepped up his rhetoric minimizing the virus and he has held two to three likely super-spreader events per day for the last week, many in states that have rapidly rising case loads and hospitalizations. He continues to violate and ridicule the only preventive measures we have, or will have, between now and when we can be widely vaccinated, and he continues to lie relentlessly about when such vaccination is likely. He has caused, and will continue to cause, many thousands of needless deaths, and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of survivors of the virus and of the loss of loved ones.

Which brings me to the question of the other kind of illness he may have.

For years now psychiatrists have been arguing over whether it is possible to give Mr. Trump a diagnosis from a distance. The American Psychiatric Association defends the Goldwater rule, which rejects such diagnoses of political or other public figures without examining them. This organization preemptively threatened sanctions against member psychiatrists who attempted to diagnose Mr. Trump without examining him personally.

Others, including a group led by Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist and ethicist at Yale Law School, have concluded that the well-established Duty to Warn applies to Mr. Trump. This duty holds that patient confidentiality may or must be violated when the doctor concludes that the patient poses a clear and present danger to others, based on what the doctor has learned.

Few psychiatrists would claim that they can glean more information in a face to face two-hour diagnostic interview with a new patient than they already have about Donald Trump in the public record, which, importantly, goes back through his adolescence and childhood. I have an MD but do not practice medicine and am not licensed to do so. I have a lifelong interest in psychiatry and neurology but I am not qualified in either, but neither do I have anything to fear from APA sanctions.

So I will not give you a diagnosis, but I will tell you the criteria for the diagnoses that are most frequently discussed as mental disorders Mr. Trump may have.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD, DSM-5 301.81):

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

  1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
  2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
  3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
  4. Requires excessive admiration.
  5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
  6. Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).
  7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
  8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
  9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD, DSM-5 301.7)

  1. A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
    1. Failure to conform to social norms concerning lawful behaviors, such as performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
    2. Deceitfulness, repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for pleasure or personal profit.
    3. Impulsivity or failure to plan.
    4. Irritability and aggressiveness, often with physical fights or assaults.
    5. Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.
    6. Consistent irresponsibility, failure to sustain consistent work behavior, or honor monetary obligations.
    7. Lack of remorse, being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.
  2. The individual is at least age 18 years.
  3. Evidence of conduct disorder typically with onset before age 15 years.
  4. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Not surprisingly, both of these disorders are far more common in men than in women. When a person meets the criteria for both disorders, the term malignant narcissism is sometimes applied, although it is not an official DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the APA, 5th edition) diagnosis. In neuropsychiatric terms, it seem reasonable to hypothesize that someone who meets the criteria for both disorders has a lower than average inhibitory capacity of the prefrontal cortex in relation to the impulses stemming from the amygdala.

When a man (and it would likely be a man) who meets even some of these criteria is in charge of the “land of the free,” he puts millions of people at risk. Objectively, his personal behavior resulted in his family, aides, staff, associates, and their families becoming infected with SARS-CoV2. Whether they mostly got it from him (quite possible) or got it from each other under conditions he created and insisted on, he caused them to be ill. His wife is still coughing, too sick to campaign with him. His friend and debate coach Chris Christie spent a week in the hospital with a much more severe case than Mr. Trump had, and after his release he publicly announced that he was wrong and publicly advised Americans to do the opposite of what their president is encouraging them to do.

The result has been, and will continue to be, what Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains above in his answer to Jake Tapper’s question. Yes, the President of the United States is continuing to hold one superspreader event after another, and yes, the President of the United States has caused and will cause at least scores of thousands of unnecessary deaths, which are the tip of the iceberg of American suffering.

A few hours ago, an analysis published by the Columbia University School of Public Health estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 of the 223,000 people who have died of COVID-19 in the US to date had preventable deaths. Suppose we take the lower number and cut it in half to get to a rock-bottom minimum. That would leave 65,000 needless deaths so far, approximately the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

Or, consider how news outlets and people throughout the world react to the crash of a single jumbo jet that kills 350 passengers and crew; billions of people react with pity and grief, and eventually may get angry, trying to find out why the plane crashed and who perhaps should be held responsible. My very-lowball estimate of 65,000 preventable deaths so far is the equivalent of 186 jumbo jet crashes, or around one crash every day since the first US case.

As you know, I’m not enthusiastic about predictions, but the consensus model (thanks again to Dr. Craig Hadley) has us at around 5,000 cases a week right now, rising to around 5,500 over the next month. If protective measures are relaxed, we could go to over 7,000, or if they are more strongly applied, half that. If we stay between 5,000 and 5,500, we will have added 50,000 to 55,000 deaths by New Year’s Eve. I consider that a low estimate, but we could easily reduce it to 30,000 or less, or if we are reckless enough, increase it to 70,000 or more.

Thus with this very conservative model of models, we could save at least 40,000 lives by enhancing rather than relaxing protective measures. Taking into account the advent of flu season, the effect of winter driving people inside, and the holiday season creating larger-than-usual family gatherings, the maximum number of deaths, and therefore the potential number of saved lives, could be much greater.

This is without considering the impact of Mr. Trump’s more than daily superspreader events around the country for the last three weeks leading up to November 3rd. Mr. Trump’s behavioral role in causing the new wave of the pandemic we are in would be explained if it were possible to find in him traits 4 and 7 in the NPD criteria above, and/or traits 5 and 7 in the ASPD criteria. Speaking as a lay person who has access to all public information about Mr. Trump, I think it is legitimate to state that he has those four traits. This is not a diagnosis, but it is tantamount to finding that he is an effective ally of the virus in its spread through our people.

The chart, based on Johns Hopkins University data (not projections) suggests that we are well into the third wave of the US pandemic, with a steep rise in daily cases rivalling the maximum achieved nationally in July, and still very much on the upward swing. Thirty-one states have more cases this week than last, and only one, Hawaii, has fewer.

Hospitalizations (second chart), a much better measure, are already following suit, and many states, particularly in the Midwest and Great Plains, are beginning to see overflow crises comparable to what we saw in New York in March and April and in the southern states in July. Deaths will duly surge, although not as much as in the past, since fortunately we are saving more of those hospitalized.

What caused the third wave? Many factors. Dismally prepared college openings caused youth outbreaks which caused community spread. People let their guard down in crowded bars and restaurants. The President of the United States made fun of mask wearing and encouraged people to relax other precautions. Premature school openings were often reversed because of spikes in cases, not usually harmful to children but gravely threatening to teachers, staff, and families. And spread continued in and from nursing homes, prisons, and meat packing plants.

Good News

  1. While two major vaccine trials (AstraZenica, Johnson & Johnson) were halted because of adverse effects, including a death, two other major trials (Pfizer, Moderna) are progressing well and could request emergency use authorization from the FDA by early December. The FDA vaccine group is meeting today to discuss guidelines for approval.
  2. Although Remdesivir has proved disappointing in the most recent research, it has been successful in other studies, and it just became the first treatment approved by the FDA specifically for COVID-19.
  3. Another antiviral, now called EIDD-2801 has been extremely successful in a mouse model that carries transplanted human lung tissue. Unlike Remdesevir, it is an oral medication, and could be used as an outpatient treatment very early in the disease, or even prophylactically for those with known exposure. Human trials are under way.
  4. Antibody cocktails such as Mr. Trump received (part of his VIP treatment) are under study and may prove their efficacy in time, in ongoing trials.
  5. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, after an apparently near-death-experience with the virus—which he likely caught from or because of Mr. Trump—has become a strong advocate of taking the virus seriously and applying all known preventive measures.
  6. The best news is that we already have a hugely effective vaccination program: First Shot: Social Distancing; First Booster: Wear a Mask; Second Booster: Wash Your Hands; Follow-up Examination: TETRIS (Testing, Contact tracing, Isolation). This is the vaccination program that has utterly beaten the virus in quite a few other countries. Will we ever use it?

Do the right thing, be patient, this will pass, live to brag about how you didn’t get it and didn’t give it to anyone else, stay safe,

Dr. K

PS: Please don’t rely just on me. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York TimesCoronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter. With thanks to Prof. Craig Hadley, I also strongly recommend this COVID-19 Forecast Hub, which aggregates the data from dozens of mathematical models, and this integrative model based on machine learning, which has outperformed most others in its projections.

TETRIS Is Dead. So Is the CDC. And the FDA. And 188,000 Americans.

            “We are not anywhere near done with this and I think we have more days ahead of us than we have behind us.”

            Ashish Jha, MD, Harvard School of Public Health, August 28

            “The problem here is the credibility of the FDA is crumbling before our eyes. This is an agency that so many of us in the scientific world have looked up to, trusted it, we know that they have these really rigorous scientific protocols, but that’s all changed this year.”

                        Seema Yasmin, MD, Stanford University, September 2

            “Obviously there are places around the world that have been able to control this. What I’m starting to feel is the existential threat is the human behavior. I’m discouraged and frustrated… Other countries are essentially vaccinated right now, not because they have a vaccine, but because they did these things, they are back to normal. They reduced their death rates into the dozens or hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands.”

                        Sanjay Gupta, MD, Emory University, September 4

Dear Students,

You remember what TETRIS is, right?

TEsting. Contact TRacing. ISolation.

Those are the “these things” Dr. Gupta is referring to above, along with mask wearing and social distancing, that have enabled other advanced countries with large populations to have hundreds of deaths from COVID-19, while we have hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Good News:

  1. Many other countries have got this under control, and they are immediately using TETRIS to bring any new breakouts under control. Per capita hospitalizations and deaths are a tiny fraction of what they are here now, and that gap will only widen as they prevent and control their second wave—which we won’t have because never controlled the first wave, only smushed it down and smeared it, and that only a little. Our second wave will come on top of an enduring first wave.
  2. Cases per week have gone steadily down in the U.S. for at least a month, and that is good news if real. As you know I was skeptical of case rates when they were going up because politicians were saying daily that the rise was only because of more testing. Now when we know testing is going down, because it was badmouthed by politicians and the CDC recommended doing less of it. You don’t hear politicians saying one reason for the decline in case rates is less testing. Deaths, being a lagging indicator, have gone down only slightly. Also, the southern states are doing somewhat better while the midwest is having its big first wave, and the northeast is rising but from very low levels.
  3. Vaccine development is proceeding around the world. Phase III testing is going slowly and will be difficult to interpret because of marked underrecruitment of minority people, who are way overrepresented among the cases, hospitalizations, and illnesses.
  4. Finally, the sum total of well-designed research has shown that steroid treatment (like dexamethasone) reduces deaths in patients severely ill with the virus. Death rate for 1,700 people across 12 countries was 32% with steroid treatment and 40% with placebo. That amounts to saving 1 in 5 very sick COVID-19 patients who would otherwise have died.
  5. There is a lot of talk about, and even some progress in, cheap rapid testing, but the deployment of these tests has been slow due to manufacturing bottlenecks and general badmouthing of testing by politicians. Nevertheless as these tests become more available, we should make progress against our U.S. pandemic (near the world’s worst), but that would require a revival of TETRIS and a modification of behavior based on test results.
  6. The CDC has issued a mandate against evictions until January 1, as a public health measure. But the CDC does not have a police department and it will leave enforcement to local authorities. There are many exceptions that would still allow people to be evicted, and after January 1 all those protected will owe all back rent. Perhaps there will be another Congressional stimulus package by then to soften that blow.

Bad News

  1. The latest models from IHME and Johns Hopkins agree on where we are now, and the graph shows three projections as to where we are going, depending on one of threee assumptions. The most likely scenario (dark blue line) shows where we will be on January 1 if we keep on doing what we’re doing: 300,000 deaths total, and adding about 3,000 deaths a day. If we had universal mask use, that total would be around 230,000 and the daily deaths would stay under a thousand for a while in the fall before doubling or tripling again with the cold weather (more time indoors) and the flu season giving many both viruses. If we continue to have easing of social distancing mandates, we are expected to have 600,000 total deaths and almost 12,000 cases a day by years end. You will hear some politicians say that these projections have been wrong throughout in overestimating the future damage. This is a lie. Except for the very beginning when nobody knew anything, the IHME reference scenario has been too optimistic. Testing is going down or staying at low levels in most states, contact tracing is beyond inadequate, and isolation is accordingly moot.
  2. We’ve learned that infected people are most likely to infect others during the first week or ten days of significant viral load, which is why superspreader events attended by healthy people are the major U.S. source of viral spread right now. These are most likely to be indoor, largely unmasked, crowded events. Viruses linger in the air for hours in many such spaces. These superspreader events have included Mardi Gras, church services in Arkansas and elsewhere, funerals in Georgia and Ohio, and a Boston meeting of executives at Biogen, a large molecular technology company, among many others. The Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in early August has resulted in at least 70 cases so far (it’s difficult of course to track folks from an event like that). These are in addition to the well known virus petri dishes known as cruise ships, prisons, nursing homes, meatpacking plants, choir practices, and now colleges and universities. Luck matters, since one person can be a key superspreader, and neither you nor they know which one in the crowd they may be.
  3. In the past month or two there has been a wave of oh-so-careful openings of colleges and universities, and now there is a national wave of even faster closings. (See my update predicting this and explaining why it was inevitable.) Despite evidence of universities acting to cover up coronavirus cases, we know that there have been outbreaks at many, and they are rapidly spreading the virus to the local communities. As of September 3, “More than 100 colleges have reported at least 100 cases over the course of the pandemic, including dozens that have seen spikes in recent weeks as dorms have reopened and classes have started. Many of the metro areas with the most cases per capita in recent days — including Auburn, Ala.; Ames, Iowa; and Statesboro, Ga. — have hundreds of cases at universities.” Thousands upon thousands of students are now being sent home, where they will bring virus to their communities. (See my update on “Bye-Bye Grannie.”)
  4. “Sloppy coronavirus immunity” is a term that has been used to describe the handful of documented cases of people getting the virus twice (it also applies to other coronaviruses, like the common cold). At least one of the reinfected patients caught a different strain, so as you know viral evolution will play a role. It should also apply to the question of how effective any immunity from a future vaccine will be, and how long it will last. Vaccine refusal in the U.S. has been at high levels for decades, and this vaccine will be no exception, unless the rushing of it and the prior erosion of public trust swells the ranks of anti-vaxxers to unprecedented levels (especially if, as is likely, it requires two shots). Imagine a COVID-19 vaccine that gives us about the same level of protection as the seasonal flu vaccine (~50%), lasts about as long (<1 year), and is accepted by 50% of the population. So we’d have seasonal protection for a quarter of the population, have to repeat the shots every year, and we’d still have to have over a hundred million more cases and hundreds of thousands more deaths to get to herd immunity.
  5. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Laureate and former National Institutes of Health head, and Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, published an article on August 31 called, “It Has Come to This: Ignore the CDC.” Their statement is based on the latest of a series of false, incompetent, and frankly craven pronouncements of “advice” issued or changed by the political appointee at the top of that organization, obviously in response to pressure from those who appointed him, non-doctors and non-scientists all. When Stanford’s Dr. Seema Yasmin said (above), “the credibility of the FDA is crumbling before our eyes,” she was likewise referring to the latest of multiple instances of knuckling under by the political appointee directing that organization. This would be (together with the CDC) following orders from non-doctors and non-scientists in the White House to order states to prepare for widespread distribution of a vaccine by November 1 or sooner. These non-experts say that it is purely coincidental that this is two days before our national election on November 3. The vaccine will be deployed with great fanfare on the basis of far-from-complete Phase III trials, it will put minority people at greatest risk, and there will no time to find out what damage is done by this half-baked but highly touted vaccine before people vote.
  6. The principal advisor on the pandemic in the White House is now Scott Atlas, MD, a neuroradiologist and health policy wonk at Stanford’s right-wing Hoover Institution. Dr. Atlas has no qualifications in infectious disease, epidemiology, or virology, but he is happy to parrot the long-standing White House views playing down the virus. He has denied reports by several reliable sources that he argues openly in Task Force meetings with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx (the real experts) and he has more than hinted that he favors “herd immunity” as a strategy, which would entail far more American deaths than the huge numbers projected above. Like an overpopulated herd of deer, we would be culled.

I must say it surprised me to see the expression on Dr. Gupta’s face and hear him say he is “discouraged and frustrated.” I am too, and that’s why it’s been so long since my last update. Frankly, I expected more from him. He’s one of my greatest heros—a top-flight brain surgeon and medical school professor, the most inspired and gifted medical broadcast journalist who ever lived, and, I’m proud to say, our colleague at Emory.

My expectations for him were totally unfair. Unlike me, he has rubbed his nose in this stinking situation all day every day for eight months. Also unlike me, he probably has not had a dark view of human nature lasting a lifetime, based on a different branch of science—behavioral biology. So yes, he has a right to see the “existential threat” in “human behavior,” and he has more right than me to feel discouraged and frustrated, having worked his heart out 24/7 to prevent things from getting anywhere near this bad. Which it wouldn’t have if people had listened to him. It will still save many lives if people start listening now.

Mardi Gras: outbreaks. Memorial Day Weekend: big outbreaks. July 4th weekend: ditto.

So we’re in the Labor Day Weekend now.

What do I think is going to happen?

What do you think is going to happen?

Stay safe,

Dr. K

PPS: Please don’t rely just on me. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York TimesCoronavirus Resource Center (NYT). For uncannily accurate warnings, follow @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter.

One Marshmallow

       “These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff.”

       Laurence Steinberg, The New York Times, June 15, 2020, referring to proposed college reopenings

Dear Students,

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) wrote a column called “America Fails the Marshmallow Test.” This is a reference to a famous 1960s psychological experiment, in which a marshmallow (or cookie, or piece of candy) is placed in front of a young child, who is told she can eat that marshmallow now, but if she waits 15 minutes, she’ll get two instead of one. Studies stemming from this experiment became a cottage industry, and among the claims made by those involved, being able to postpone gratification for greater gain was a fundamental character trait in the two-marshmallow kids that predicted much about their later success. They were said to have better “executive function,” meaning their frontal lobes were better able to suppress the impulse to get one marshmallow now in order to get two later.

Krugman understood that a 2018 study apparently failed to replicate the marshmallow study, but wanted to use the metaphor for our country’s inability to wait a little longer before lifting social distancing restrictions. Actually, the marshmallow study was not debunked by the 2018 replication, which has been criticized for controlling away some variables (like early cognitive ability) that are intrinsic to what the marshmallow test tries to measure. Also, the replication did find that the test predicted some characteristics of adolescents, just not as much as earlier studies claimed. The critics of the critics—the marshmallow defenders—called their paper “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait,” with the running head, “Delaying Gratification Matters.”

Speaking of delaying gratification, it’s not just five-year-olds who are not good at it. Adolescents are not good at it either.

I know you don’t like to think of yourselves as adolescents, but the fact is that brain development is not complete until age 25 or so, and the main part of the brain that keeps developing is precisely those frontal lobes that are involved in executive functions: planning, reasoning, analyzing, and yes, postponing gratification. This period of extended frontal cortex development has been called youth, pre-adulthood, or emerging adulthood.

Psychologist Laurence Steinberg is the world’s leading authority on brain development in adolescence and beyond, especially in relation to executive functions. He has co-authored papers in law and psychology journals with titles like “Blaming Youth,” “Young Adulthood as a Transitional Legal Category,” and “Less Guilty by Reason of Adolescence.” He has tried to protect young people from the most severe punishments for acts which they literally did not have the brainpower to control.

Now Steinberg has weighed in on a question many of you have asked me about: College reopenings in August, including ours. Steinberg, who has spent his life as a college professor researching the young, wrote an essay two weeks ago called, “Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy.”

Based on his 40 years of research on young people, he writes, “Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s. Moreover, interventions designed to diminish risk-taking in this age group, such as attempts to squelch binge drinking on campus, have an underwhelming track record. There is little reason to think that the approaches proposed to mitigate transmission of the coronavirus among college students will fare any better.”

The evidence on the other side is very strong. Steinberg and his colleagues recently completed “a study of more than 5,000 people between the ages of 10 and 30 from 11 different countries (including both Western and non-Western ones)… Consistent with large-scale epidemiological studies, we found a peak in risk-taking somewhere between age 20 and 24 in virtually every country.” There are three straightforward reasons.

Youth (not just adolescence) is a time of 1. heightened risk taking, and 2. poor self-regulation in all cultures. These two psychological features of young adulthood are in turn explained by 3. easier activation of the brain’s reward circuits, made even worse under conditions of emotional arousal and in the presence of peers.

To Laurence Steinberg, who probably knows more about not only the psychology but the neurobiology of young people than anyone else alive, college reopenings will be a “perfect storm” for viral spread. College reopenings are also being criticized by moral philosophers, college presidents, lawyers, and, of course, some epidemiologists. Dr. Anthony Fauci, our nation’s leading expert on the pandemic, says the matter is “complicated” and will depend on what region of the country you’re talking about.

It’s not always a bad idea to take a reward now even though it may be smaller. That’s why we have the proverb, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Young people are designed to take risks for short-term rewards because that is how they test themselves, learn about life, find mates, make friends, and generally position themselves among their peers. Up to a point you have to take risks.

But we are not talking about a torn ligament, a bad hangover, or a brush with gonorrhea. This is a situation that has never before existed in my lifetime, not even during the early years of HIV/AIDS. I have repeatedly emphasized to you that the unknowns in relation to this pandemic are greater than the knowns, and that remains true. Right now cases are on the rise in the nation, in most states, and in almost every major city in the southern half of the country from Los Angeles to Miami.

The entire state university system of California will be 100 percent online. If you were in college in a rural area of Massachusetts or New York, you would probably be safe attending live, but you are not in one of those colleges. The situation in Atlanta is uncertain, but Emory says it is taking precautions that will make reopening safe.

Last week I said that case counts are like lightning, and that I was waiting for the thunder—hospitalizations and deaths. Being no longer young, I am able to wait. Some leaders claim that the only reason we have more cases is that we have more testing. I think this is wrong, but I don’t want to argue about it because I can wait. Others say we really do have more cases but because the age of infection is on average much lower than it was a month or two ago, we will never see the hospitalizations or deaths go up by much.

Lightning is flashing all across the southern United States, and some say it is starting fires that will be impossible to control and that will in the end kill many. State after state in the south are backtracking on their openings. But the states don’t really control behavior, especially the behavior of the young.

The July 4th weekend is coming, and millions of young people will take the one marshmallow. What will you do?

Dr. K

100,000

Dear students,

Before I share a few post-Memorial Day thoughts about the virus and this tragic and needless milestone, I would like to mention two people who have died recently but not from the corona or any virus: George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by strangulation, while handcuffed on the ground begging for his life, and Ahmaud Arbery, a black man shot and killed by vigilantes while jogging, in a modern-day lynching in Brunswick, Georgia. These tragic and needless deaths were part of the same long-standing pattern of structural racism which, as you know, accounts for the huge over-representation of African-Americans in the deaths from COVID-19.

I am frankly confused about where we are in the pandemic right now, both in our country and the world. More Americans have died of COVID-19 than in all the wars since the Korean War, and it is quite possible that before this is over we may be able to include the Korean War in that count. I see what appears to be a wholesale abandonment of the science of public health and medicine by many Americans. I can’t tell you how many, but I am pretty sure it’s enough to keep the U.S. epidemic boiling (not simmering) for months. Maybe we get a rest in September before the second wave. Or will it be the third wave?

I’ve always told you the most important thing you have to know is the limits of what you know. So I’m telling you now. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t know about future cases, hospitalizations, or deaths because the models are shot to hell by the unpredicted and unpredictable behavior of a substantial minority of Americans. I don’t know about progress in vaccines or treatment because every announcement is not a scientific publication but a press release that hugely moves stock prices, especially of the companies involved. Remdesevir and convalescent plasma are in wide use and seem to have some effectiveness, but convincing studies have not been published. I do know something about the anti-malarial drug Whaddayagottalose-oquine. Worldwide randomized controlled trials have been stopped because more people die with it than without it. I took it for years, first to prevent malaria in Africa, then for a minor autoimmune condition. On March 25th in a private email I said that more research was needed but that I would take it if I got COVID-19. Now I wouldn’t. Lesson? Anecdotes, even from smart people, are no substitute for real studies.

This past weekend we commemorated those who gave their lives for our freedom; they died hoping we would use freedom wisely. Yesterday we flew our flags at half-mast to mourn 100,000 dead Americans. Today I want to celebrate the new warriors at the front of the coronavirus wars.

Good News

  1. Dr. Richard Levitan, 59, a leading expert on teaching intubation, left safe Northern New Hampshire to volunteer for ten days at New York’s dangerous Bellevue hospital. After his first exhausting shift he went to his brother’s apartment, where he was staying, and was kicked out by the building’s other residents. He found some kind of lodging, completed his ten days, and wrote an article teaching others throughout the world how to deal with COVID-19 pneumonia.
  2. If you click on one link in this message, make it Dr. Sharon Duclos, a Family Medicine specialist in Cedar Valley, Iowa, and watch the video, recorded on May 6th, the day before the local Tyson meatpacking plant, the source of the cases that overwhelmed Dr. Duclos and her colleagues, reopened under government orders. She appeared calm today (May 28) at a press conference with other local medical leaders; she is at around minute 14:30 in this new video. She implored people to keep taking precautions, “as we go through the little lulls and valleys, and the peaks that will occur with this, for months to come.” More on this below.
  3. Sylvia Leroy, 35, was a labor and delivery nurse at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, where patients she cared for were positive for the virus. She got it. She was 28 weeks pregnant with her second child. Her own hospital did not take proper care of her. She was transferred to Mount Sinai where she got better care but went into cardiac arrest for some four to eight minutes; the doctor who called Sylvia’s sister was crying herself. They delivered her baby, Esther, by C-section. The baby needed oxygen but was “pink and healthy.” As of May 20, Sylvia was very slowly recovering from brain damage; Baby Esther was doing well. See their GoFundMe page here. Her sister once asked her why she didn’t go into private practice. “And she said to me, ‘This is an underserved community. Who is going to help them if I don’t help them?’”
  4. Dr. Ryan Padgett, 45, who played football for Northwestern in the Rose Bowl, was one of the first U.S. doctors to get the virus. It was still February, and nobody knew anything, but he was taking care of a string of patients from one nursing home in Kirkland, Washington. He was in great shape, hardly ever missed a day of work, but in March he was near death. He recovered, but still had more recovery ahead of him, when he said, “As an emergency physician, you walk into every single room and take care of whatever is there. Going back, I don’t think that will change. I hope not.”
  5. Dr. Theresa Greene, an emergency physician in Miami, temporarily lost custody of her 4-year-old daughter because she takes care of COVID-19 patients. She said, “I think it’s not fair. It’s cruel to ask me to choose between my child and the oath I took as a physician. I won’t abandon my team at work or the patients who will increasingly look to me to save their lives in the coming weeks, but it’s torture.” She and her husband have amicably shared custody since their divorce two years ago. Why is this under “Good News”? Nobody’s sick. Nobody died. However unfair it may be, mother and daughter will live to put this separation behind them.

Bad News

  1. Madhvi Aya, 61, was a doctor in India but a senior physician assistant in the U.S. She worked at a hospital in one of the poorest sections of Brooklyn; it was overflowing with coronavirus patients, and she was there until she got sick herself. At the end, in a different hospital, she was alone after texting with her husband, mother, and daughter, whom she had been very afraid of infecting. She often said, “We have to take care of our patients first.”
  2. A nurse who must keep her identity secret for her own protection was on a bus in Chicago, coming home in her scrubs from a difficult shift, coughed into the crook of her elbow, with a mask, and was punched in the face by a man who accused her of trying to give him the virus. He gave her a black eye. Attacks on coronavirus heroes in all frontline professions have been happening all over the world. “It’s not going to stop me from coming to work every single day and taking care of the people I take care of,” she said.
  3. Immigrant Celia Marcos, 61, worked as a nurse at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for 16 years until her death in April from COVID-19, which she almost certainly contracted from a patient. Her family and colleagues state that she was not provided with proper PPE, which the hospital denied. Her son Donald said, “when the call of duty came, she will do the best that she could.” He also said she “coded seven times” before she died. In their last conversation he said, “when you get out of that hospital, you will retire immediately.” She barely was able to say yes. Both were crying.
  4. Jason Hargrove, 50, a bus driver in Detroit, loved his job and did it faithfully, carrying essential workers and others to their own jobs. A passenger openly coughed near him without covering her mouth, and he recorded a Facebook video about the incident. He was worried about the other passengers and himself. He said, “I feel violated.” He died of the virus 11 days later. He left home by 5am and disinfected his bus every day. He would tell his wife, “Baby, when you get off work, make sure you grab me some more Lysol… I gotta make sure that my people are protected.”
  5. Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, head of the emergency medicine department at NY Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, contracted the virus while heroically trying to save others. She recovered, but the hospital told her to stay home. She moved from NY to her parents home in Charlottesville. There, with no history of mental illness, she took her own life. Her father said, “Make sure she’s praised as a hero.”

Under the Russian Tsars, young men were drafted into the army for 25 years. As a child I knew an old man who had chopped off the first joint of his own trigger finger to avoid that fate. And why do I mention this? Because many, maybe even most of you, have told me you want to become nurses, physician assistants, or physicians. You are signing up for roughly twice the length of service that the Tsars demanded of young people. There will be another pandemic like this in your career. You will be called on. Even medical students have been called on in this crisis. You will not say no when you are asked to put your own life, and that of your loved ones, in danger, because that is your oath. Even when you think or know that you are risking your life for stupid people who put their own lives in danger, you will serve. Know what you are signing up for.

It was very interesting for me to watch today’s press conference on local television in Black Hawk County, Iowa. This is the cutting edge of the U.S. pandemic going forward. The local Tyson meatpacking plant reopened because the governor and the president said so, and because it was in their financial interest. Three leading local physicians and county health officials spoke. They stated that they did not know what was going on at the Tyson plant and would not be getting that information. They said they could not do contact tracing of confirmed cases. A county health official laughed at the idea of testing health care workers in nursing homes, because they don’t have the resources to do it.

Don’t think about New York any more. Think about Black Hawk County. Times ten. Or maybe times 100.

Stay safe,

Dr. K

Triumph of the (Teenage) Human Spirit

Resilience is sometimes astounding, and we need to acknowledge it.

school-group-wearing-red-c-uA boy, in flames, is running, screaming, across the parking lot of his school on an otherwise ordinary morning. The image evokes Vietnam or Bosnia, but it is Charleston, South Carolina, Wednesday, December 8. The school happens to be the number-one ranked Academic Magnet High School in the United States, and it shares a campus with a highly regarded School of the Arts. The burning boy is running toward the magnet school’s front doors. Read more