Panic Testing in Progress
If you don’t have Covid, I suspect one of the best places to catch it is stand in line for hours with people who think they do.
Biden to Address the Nation
On Tuesday, the President will deliver remarks on the status of the country’s fight against COVID-19, as the country sees rising cases amid the growing Omicron variant.
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) December 18, 2021
President Biden plans to deliver remarks Tuesday, as Cities and Organizations Cancel Many Holiday Celebrations in the US and abroad.
More places in Europe and the U.S. were tightening restrictions, canceling holiday gatherings and bracing for a surge in new Covid-19 cases, as officials worked to boost testing and healthcare capacity amid the rising risk from the Omicron variant.
The coronavirus’s Omicron variant has been detected in 89 countries, and Covid-19 cases of the variant are doubling every 1.5 to 3 days in places with community transmission, the World Health Organization said Saturday. The variant is spreading rapidly even in countries with high levels of immunity in the population, the WHO said.
The Dutch government imposed lockdown measures, with all nonessential shops, bars and restaurants closed until mid-January.
Paris canceled its traditional New Year’s Eve festivities on the Champs-Élysées. London Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a “major incident” in the British capital following what he said was the largest daily rise in cases in the city since the pandemic began, with 26,000 new cases recorded in the latest 24 hours.
Stark Warning
We are prepared for the rising case levels, and @POTUS will detail how we will respond to this challenge. He will remind Americans that they can protect themselves from severe illness from COVID-19 by getting vaccinated and getting their booster shot when they are eligible.
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) December 18, 2021
NFL’s Surprising Reaction to Record Covid-19 Cases: Do Less Testing
Earlier today I noted NFL’s Surprising Reaction to Record Covid-19 Cases: Do Less Testing
95% of NFL players are vaccinated and 100% of the coaches are. That is amazingly high vs health care workers and the population at large.
Two-thirds of the players who have tested positive this week are asymptomatic, NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills. The other third, he said, are suffering very mild symptoms.
Proposed New Step
Don’t stand in line for hours with people who think they have Covid!
Associating with presumed-infected people will necessitate the need for still more tests.
If we are going to test, can we please test at home?
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WIV’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the
molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie
dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a
press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without
getting sick.”
Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat
coronaviruses – co-authoring a link to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov which described the creation of a new virus by combining a
coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
In 2015, Nature magazine link to nature.com over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same
year, the US government link to nature.comlink to nature.comdue to their concern over risks
of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
A bat coronavirus with a never before seen pangolin-like RBM
came from a wet market that didn’t sell bats or pangolins, and now some other species
is the intermediary – unless a pangolin is eventually found with SARS-CoV-2.
Zheng-Li Shi, the head of bat coronavirus research at WIV, link to scientificamerican.com as much:
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in
central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces
of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses
jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If
coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come
from our lab?”
Wuhan,
in short, is a rather unlikely epi-center for a natural zoonotic transfer. In
contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both
reasonable and obvious.
The new virus certainly seems to
be effective at infecting humans, despite its animal origins. The closest wild
relative of SARS-CoV-2 link to nature.com, which suggests it originated in
a bat, then jumped to humans either directly or through another species.
(Another coronavirus found in wild pangolins also resembles SARS-CoV-2, but
only in the small part of the spike that recognizes ACE2; the two viruses are
otherwise dissimilar, and pangolins are unlikely to be the original reservoir
of the new virus.) When SARS-classic first made this leap, a brief period of
mutation was necessary for it to recognize ACE2 well. But SARS-CoV-2 could do
that from day one. “It had already found its best way of being a [human]
virus,” says link to medschool.umaryland.edu of the University of
Maryland School of Medicine.
In 2015, Nature magazine link to nature.com over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same
year, the US government link to nature.comlink to nature.comdue to their concern over risks
of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
· Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards
at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, link to washingtonpost.com.
In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected
horseshoe bats at a cave 1,000 miles away link to wsj.com.
Stored away
and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19. -WSJ
The WIV
lab, along with researchers in the U.S. and Switzerland, showed in 2015 the
scary-good capability of bat coronaviruses to thrive in human cells. In that
paper, which was published in 2015 in the journal link to nature.com, they described how they had created a
chimeric SARS-like virus out of the link to livescience.com found in horseshoe
bats, called SHC014, and the backbone of a SARS virus that could be grown in
mice. The idea was to look at the potential of coronaviruses circulating in bat
populations to infect humans. In a lab dish, the chimeric coronavirus could
infect and replicate in primary human airway cells; the virus also was able to
infect lung cells in mice.
That
study was met with some pushback from researchers who considered the risk of
that kind of research to outweigh the benefits. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was one of those scientists. Wain-Hobson
emphasized the fact that this chimeric virus “grows remarkably well” in human
cells, adding that “If the virus escaped, nobody
could predict the trajectory,” link to nature.com.
it’s not just adults who are run through it. This story focuses on Judge
Donna Scott Davenport’s juvenile court in a Tennessee county, where an
estimated 1,500 children have been jailed improperly, some as young as 7
and 8 years old. It’s powerful accountability work.
link to psyarxiv.com (preprint) (PDF) PsyArXiv. From the Abstract:
[says David Dowdy, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health]. ‘But it’s not just about the
variant, it’s also about the host and the environment.’”
spreading, hospitals are filling, and millions remain unvaccinated. If
America keeps stress-testing its hospitals and their staff, some of them
will break.