health

The Atlantic
"Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we’re only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates)."
Another important update from Ed Yong. It's worth changing our behavior again to limit covid spread so we can keep our health care system working.
New York Times
"But for much of the arguments, Justice Barrett did seem ready to reverse Roe. For instance, she repeatedly suggested that pregnant people had no need for abortion because they could simply put their children up for adoption."
The supreme court is taking away health rights and personal autonomy and framing it as neutrality. This stolen majority is doing the job it was put there to do. Where are Democrats?

Update: oh, here they are. Tweeting.
apnews.com
"Republican legislators in more than half of U.S. states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers that state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases."
Republicans want people to die. If they didn't want to maximize deaths from the pandemic, how would their actions be different? The Republican party sure looks like a death cult from the outside.
STAT
"At the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said that a close contact was somebody that you’re indoors with unmasked for 15 minutes or more. The equivalent of that with the Delta variant is not 15 minutes, it’s one second."
Grimacing emoji.
Your Local Epidemiologist
Can I (a vaccinated parent) transmit the virus to my (unvaccinated) kids?

Yes. During pre-Delta, vaccines reduced transmission by a lot (85-90%), but they’re not perfect (100%). So, yes you can give the virus to your kids, although it’s much less probable than an unvaccinated person. We do not know how Delta changes the game. Delta is stickier with a higher viral load, so Delta has the potential to transmit from vaccinated to unvaccinated higher than before. But we just don’t know yet.
An epidemiologist looks at the Delta variant's impact on kids who can't get vaccinated yet.
The Atlantic
"As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said."
Places with high vaccine hesitancy like Missouri are still struggling with covid.
Bloomberg
"Even mild cases of Covid led to loss of volume in certain areas of the brain, specifically those involved in processing smell and taste. But they also found statistically significant brain volume loss in the gray matter — the thin layer on the surface of the brain that contains most of the neurons — in other areas involved with memory formation."
Covid impacts more than just killing people and I hope that starts to factor into people's decision to get a vaccine. We're fortunate to have the ability in the US to keep this from happening to people.
New York Times
"Everyone always focuses on the virus evolving — this is showing that the B cells are doing the same thing," said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "And it’s going to be protective against ongoing evolution of the virus, which is really encouraging."
A++ would vaccinate again.
Culture Study
"People have all sorts of reasons for wanting to work remotely. It might make them better workers. It might allow them to maintain their physical and emotional well-being in a way that’s incompatible with full time office work."
We have a unique opportunity to rethink how we do office work. I hope we do.
STAT
"If the global pool of flu viruses has truly shrunk to this degree, it would be a welcome outcome, flu experts say, making the twice-a-year selection of viruses to be included in flu vaccines for the Northern and Southern hemispheres much easier work."
Our work to keep COVID-19 from spreading may have killed some strains of the flu. [via mefi]
Insight
"Now that we have safe, effective vaccines, we can give people immunity without causing dangerous disease. That puts us into a global race against the virus. The more people who see the vaccine before they see SARS-CoV-2, the fewer severe cases, long-term health problems, and deaths. Faster worldwide rollout will save lives. It really is that simple."
A great explanation of why it's the novelty of the coronavirus that makes it deadly and explains some of its seemingly unique properties.
Scientific American
As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. “There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades.
I wonder if masks could help with keeping flu numbers down post-covid.
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