Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 203 COVID update. The highlights are:
- Cases of COVID, Influenza, and RSV are all falling as the Winter respiratory virus season comes to a close. That said, we have seen serious outbreaks in Spring and Summer. We can only hope that this doesn’t happen again this year.
- Nearly all of the new COVID cases in the USA are now due to the JN.1 strain which has outcompeted all the other variants.
- New studies of pregnant patients who became infected with COVID show a >3x risk of severe illness in the patient and her baby among those who have not been vaccinated.
- The WHO has approved BCM’s COVID vaccine, Corbevax, developed by Drs. Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi. The vaccine, like others developed by this team at Texas Childrens, is intended for resource poor countries. It is being produced in India, and has been used in millions of people. It costs about $1 per person. Suck on that, Moderna & Pfizer!
- The US has the highest prevalence of anxiety disorders in the world. During the COVID apocalypse, it worsened. Some have attributed this increase in American anxiety to loneliness, but more recent work suggests that the real issue is the feeling of being left to fend for oneself. (my perspective on this below).
- The CDC recently reported an increase in adolescent drug and alcohol use related to anxiety and depression.
- The CDC also reports recently on outbreaks of Measels among children who were un- or under-vaccinated. Those of us born before 1957 have immunity from childhood infection. Unfortunately, some of our childhood cohort died of the disease because there was no vaccine at that point in history. Sigh.
My perspectives include the following:
The Marvel and DC cinematic universes have Iron Man, The X-Men and other superheroes. We are fortunate to have Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi and many others who fight to protect all of us, but especially children, from vaccine-preventable illness. They are real superheroes.
The idea that Americans’ anxiety worsened during the COVID pandemic because of feeling that they had been left to fend for themselves resonates with me. To me, the pandemic was just another personal medical problem to solve. I approached it from the privileged perspective of a trained albeit retired physician with access to current medical literature and an understanding of the history of viral respiratory diseases, married to a retired physician who had been the Director of the section on Communicable Diseases at the Texas Department of Health, and a son who is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases at a large, academic medical center. We never felt alone – abandoned to fend for ourselves. Like Matt Damon in The Martian, we just had to solve one problem after another until we got through the pandemic.
American pandemic anxiety was about self-efficacy. Dr. Klotman’s weekly COVID updates for almost 4 years have been an effort dedicated to increasing the self-efficacy of people otherwise bewildered by the pandemic. Unfortunately, a feckless former President (45) and less-than-stellar head of the CDC (Rochelle Walensky) did nothing to give Americans a sense that they could safely navigate the pandemic. Anti-vaxxers, doctors peddling snake oil cures like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and political hacks like Ron DeSantis and his faux Florida Surgeon General (Joseph Ladepo) have injected nothing but noise and confusion into the fray.
We need people like Klotman, Hotez, and Bottazzi to help Americans cope with emerging diseases. Our politicians can’t do that.