So as fate would have it Andy Slavitt's podcast guest this week, was Dr. Osterholm. I had never actually listened to one of them before, but I had a sorting project and given his name was invoked today, I went ahead and gave it a listen. As, I remembered, Dr. Osterholm is the real doom & gloomer in all of this, and they referenced his pessimism a couple times, and the Dr. brought up how his news media friends say, that "Nobody wants to listen to him, because of the things he says."
They talked about several things, but the overall message was the need to remain humble in the face of this new virus. He mentioned people who presume this will resolve like an influenza pandemic, and he does not think that path is certain. He thinks we will continue to be surprised by the turns this takes, and that Spring gave people a sense of overconfidence. He is surprised by how and when things flare in one place, but not another. How one person seems to be able to spread to a dozen vaccinated people, while others don't. He thinks there are characteristics that are not well understood by anyone, so be wary of that which implies confidence in outcome.
They talked about schools, and he did not say school should be virtual, and that he recognizes the value of in-person school, he did say parents need to be realistic about what will happen. He pointed out the guidance policy makers are using is from 2020, and was appropriate for then, but not now. He understands it is hard (impossible) for kids to wear N95 masks, but without them a classroom environment will lead to transmission like camps have been this summer. He considers the concerns about pediatric long COVID as valid, and even though they are the least at risk group, poor outcomes are expected at a higher frequency than regular flu. Parents need to appreciate the seriousness of Delta, and that this is not a risk-free situation for their kids.
And they talked about how vaccines are the most important weapon we have, and the need to get the world, and the vaccine hesitant vaccinated. Don't get hung up with the vaccine hostile, they are pretty much lost.
I am sure everyone who hung on every word he said about cloth masks will be sobered by his thoughts about what the future might be, and that this is still not over. Remember, he's the guy that thinks this will take 3 years.
Changing subjects, an interesting tangent that crossed my Twitter feed today, a new study theorizes that the pandemic of 1889-1890 aka the Russian Flu, might not have been influenza at all (or not just an influenza). But the emergence of one of the other known coronaviruses HCoV-OC43. This pandemic, caused some researches to reexamine the medical recordings and findings from that time, including veterinary data, and thought the reported symptoms sounded a lot like the type of systemic stuff that is happening this time, including loss of smell and protracted recovery times for some, like long COVID. After SARS, a researcher compared modern OC43 sequences and those of bovine coronaviruses and determined they likely shared a common ancestor about 130 years ago, or about the time of the so called flu. A Swedish researcher did the same, last year and came to the same conclusion about the timeline.
Obviously, still just a theory, but here's what Wikipedia says about the timeline that played out "The most reported effects of the pandemic took place from October 1889 to December 1890, with recurrences in March to June 1891, November 1891 to June 1892, winter of 1893–1894, and early 1895." That's a lot of winters, with it still being a thing. Good thing we have vaccines.
Contemporary clinical reports on patients of the Russian flu pandemic of 1889 to 1891 show striking similarity to COVID-19 patients, demonstrating *multiorgan affections of the respiratory, intestina...
sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
). We tried good faith, we tried letting people make the right decision on their own. Now we go to plan B. The vast majority of people support vaccines, the vast majority of adults (over 70%) have already taken a jab. Public sentiment has overwhelmingly swung in favor of requiring vaccination. The best way to accomplish this is through companies requiring employees to have it and eventually schools and colleges requiring it. We don’t need a Federal mandate. Once full FDA approval is given I would be highly in favor of the CDC recommending that all companies require employees be vaccinated to report to in person work. This would give companies an easy message and help them to put these rules in place. It didn’t have to be this way, but plan B it is.
