Dr. Klotman’s Week 199 COVID update highlights are:
- We’re in the thick of respiratory virus season – Influenza, RSV, and COVID
- COVID ER visits and deaths are each up 13% nationwide; hospitalizations are up 20%
- The current COVID vaccine is effective against the most common COVID variant – JN.1
- Despite all this, fewer than 20% of adults have had the most recent vaccine
- COVID vaccine efficacy, as regards hospitalization and death, is about 60% – in other words, wear your mask and observe social distancing. Being fully vaccinated doesn’t make us invulnerable.
- In prior pandemics, including those for which there was no vaccine, the pandemics burned out because of immunity conferred by non-fatal infection and because of changes in public behavior – this hasn’t happened in the COVID pandemic because people are behaving as if behavior doesn’t matter or the pandemic is already over. Idiocy!
I can say from my own recent experiences in public spaces, that I find myself being one of the 2-3% of folks wearing a mask. I’ve had all the COVID vaccines, and I recognize that their protection is not 100% and also that I am older and more vulnerable than my younger contemporaries who foolishly consider themselves invulnerable. They are not.
Recent research has identified biological factors that seem to confer a form of resistance to severe COVID infection as well as biological factors that appear top predispose to one developing long COVID. Without getting down into the immunological weeds, let me say that the Expression of Disease is always an interplay between host factors (genetics, behavior, environment, etc.) and factors associated with the noxious stimulus (a toxin, bacteria, virus, parasite, or what have you.) That is to say that having any chronic illness (heart or lung disease, diabetes, liver or kidney disease, immune suppressing conditions, etc.) tends to make us more vulnerable to noxious stimuli.
I know, sometimes it sucks to be us.