We're going to be wearing masks forever

 

This map was lifted from the New York Times and reflects data current as of yesterday. The darker the area, the higher the COVID rate. If a person looks closely, that person may notice that the county where I reside, the one I usually think of as being safely in the middle of nowhere, sports the darkest color provided. Things are not good here, and, based on my casual observations while running errands (post office, grocery shopping, and not much else), I am not optimistic about things improving any time soon. Case numbers keep climbing; so does the death rate. 

A Facebook acquaintance, someone I know out in the real world, too, but haven't seen in person for so long she's slid into being a virtual friend, commented that the recent spate of deaths didn't worry her -- she didn't know any of the people who died. News flash: it doesn't matter. Viruses are like urban legends. All it takes is a friend of a friend to pass it along. The experts are pretty well united on the way COVID-19 is traveling now is primarily community transmission. You know, someone is walking around infected but asymptomatic, that someone doesn't bother wearing a mask in the lobby at the post office or while shopping at Larry's, the virus hangs in the air (viruses are tiny; they can float around for hours before settling on surfaces), other people inhale it, and the next thing you know a dozen people who were unlucky enough to be in the store when Joe Asshole picked up his case of bad beer are now infected too. Because Joe Asshole figures he didn't need to wear a mask in a public place. Because, you know, Freedom. 

A small digression: I have absolutely no idea why the public health community spent so much time telling us all to wash our hands and be careful about what we touched when COVID-19 is so clearly airborne. The virus enters the body through respiration; it spreads when you cough, sneeze, or simply exhale. Airborne. Masking was (and is) a whole lot more important than bathing in Purell. Hand washing and sanitation are important, but I think they got emphasized at the cost of not making the masks seem as important as they are. I'd read descriptions of super spreader events and wonder again why the experts weren't laying it on thick about airborne infections. I mean, when you have half the people at a choir practice getting sick did the epidemiologists seriously believe that the victims all contracted the illness from touching a restroom door handle? 

In any case, those of us who do worry enough to keep wearing face masks might as well brace ourselves for another six or seven months minimum of doing so. Yes, I know there is hope a vaccine (or vaccines) will be out in December. But what are the odds it's going to reach the average person quickly? It took me three trips to the Houghton Walgreens to get a flu shot; the first two times they were sold out. How fast and easy can we realistically expect obtaining a COVID vaccine to be? The answer is probably "not very." 

I'm not the only pessimist drifting around who thinks some of the euphoria over vaccine breakthroughs is a tad premature. Tony Fauci doesn't think we'll be back to a possibly maskless society until sometime next fall, like maybe the last quarter of 2021. By then masks may have moved securely into one of those fashion accessories you don without thinking, like gloves in the winter. 

Last spring the Younger Daughter and I were talking about the then very novel pandemic. I told her the way things were going (and this was back in April) that COVID-19 was going to move from being epidemic to being endemic. It was going to make a first pass through the population, pick off the most vulnerable, subside, and then come back and do it again: knock off the most vulnerable persons, subside, and then do it again. Each time around the death rate would be lower, not necessarily because we'd have gotten better at treating it but because there were fewer vulnerable people. 

At the time, this pattern (aka seasonality) was a hot topic on the Sirius XM channel I could hear for free in the Focus. (I let my Sirius subscription lapse because I didn't spend enough time in the car to make it worth it, but when the pandemic hit Sirius opened up a few public interest channels.)  I'd shelter in the shade of the Sparklight pole at the Graham County Fairgrounds, wander around the Intertubes on my notebook, and listen to various medical experts talk about COVID. Seasonality, a pattern of surging at certain times of the year, was seen as a definite possibility. My thought was it would resemble seasonal influenza: hit hard in the cold weather months, make whole bunches of people sick, bump up the death rates in nursing homes, and then go away for a few months. 

Is that what's actually going to happen? I have no clue. It's equally likely the virus could decide to be like the Spanish flu, the strain of influenza that caused a global pandemic at the end of World War I. That flu hit hard in 1918 and 1919 and then seemingly disappeared. The winter of 2020-2021 could be the last one where we worry about this particular corona virus. You never know.

How can smart people be so dumb?

We were watching "The Nightly Show" the other day. The topic of the evening was vaccination. The measles outbreak in California has been in the news a lot lately, and I've got to hand it to Larry Wilmore -- he did a pretty nice job of skewering the insanity of the people who don't vaccinate. You've got a zillion doctors and scientists saying "vaccination saves lives" on the one hand. . . and on the other you've got people like Jenny McCarthy who attended (as she puts it) the University of Google. So who do too many people believe? Jenny McCarthy. It's bizarre.

I've written about this topic before. Because my own kids are adults and I didn't watch "Oprah," I had been quietly oblivious regarding the entire anti-vaccination movement until I went to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. My first clue that idiots existed who believed vaccinations were evil was having to walk through a crowd of protesters by the main entrance to the Clifton Road campus (the complex that usually shows up when the CDC is on the news; it's where the building housing the Director's office is located). Maybe on some level it had registered that there were people who thought the mercury compound in some vaccines caused autism, but I'd never realized how vocal they were -- or how wrong. By the time the idea that the thimerosal  used as a stabilizing agent caused autism gained wide traction, the pharmaceutical industry had discontinued using it. To this day I'll hear or read someone ranting about the mercury in vaccines as though it's still being used when it was discontinued over a decade ago.

Anyway, the thing that has me baffled lately is how smart people can manage to be so dumb, so woefully and willfully ignorant. Because you know who's most likely to decide they don't want their kids vaccinated? It's the upper middle class college educated helicopter parents, the ones who freak out if the nanny screws up and gives the kid a non-organic celery stick. Yep, it's the same demographic as the people who protest the Keystone Pipeline and drive hybrid vehicles. They totally believe scientists when it comes to the topic of global climate change. But when it's their own kids and they're ask to protect them against diseases that still have crippling side effects and significant mortality rates? Suddenly they're doubters. When public health officials map the statistics for vaccination rates, the highest numbers of non-vaccinated kids always show up in the more affluent areas, the locations where the majority of the parents are supposedly well-educated. It's bizarre. The same people who freak out if their child gets a sugary snack at school are willing to take a chance on their kids contracting a disease with a 1% to 5% mortality rate.So far as I know, there haven't been any deaths associated with the Disneyland outbreak, but you don't have to be a statistician to recognize that as the number of infections goes up, so does the probability of someone dying.

When I was listening to NPR the other morning, a public health official from California mentioned that one thing they had to do was educate doctors in general on how to recognize measles. Because the disease has become so rare in the U.S., many family physicians have never seen a case. I think that's probably one of the major factors in the anti-vaccination movement, too. If you've never seen full-blown measles (or survived it), you have no clue just how nasty it is. Then again, I've never personally seen a lot of stuff, but I'm still willing to believe it exists. The stupid, it burns.

Unbelievable

I didn't think much about the anti-vaccine movement before coming to work at Large Nameless Agency. I just took it for granted that my kids would get their shots on schedule. My childhood memories of various illnesses were not good, and I had no intention of reliving some of my mother's nightmares if I could avoid it.

My sister, the one who's having one of those over-the-hill birthdays today, almost didn't make it to her first one: she had measles when she was 11 months old and, based on what my mother's said, came really close to dying. So did my brother -- he wound up in the hospital in an oxygen tent when he contracted pneumonia as a secondary infection. I probably had the lightest case --there are no family stories about anyone being particularly worried that I was about to take a dirt nap, but I do recall being in bed for at least a week, confined to a darkened room, feverish, and the doctor making repeated house calls.

I also remember several childhood friends being really, truly, horribly ill with whooping cough for what seemed like forever. My mother tells stories about diphtheria epidemics during the Depression, and I've seen the headstones in the hometown cemetery providing poignant testimony to the families that went from having 7 or 8 kids to having 1 or 2 in a matter of a few days.

In short, I didn't hesitate when I had kids. They got their shots. No questions, no quibbling, no arguing with anyone. And once they had them all, I didn't think about immunizations again until I landed here in Atlanta and was amazed to see protestors regularly picketing the Centers for Disease Control and accusing the federal government, state health departments, pharmaceutical companies, and countless others of a vast cover-up regarding vaccines. I was astounded. Somehow I had managed to miss the Jenny McCarthy dog and pony show regarding what causes autism. (To be honest, I didn't even know she had kids.) According to Orac, Jenny's become the public face of the anti-vaccine movement.

In the past year-and-a-half I've learned there are lunatics out there who dismiss illnesses such as measles as merely "childhood diseases," and who are sufficiently brain dead to do things like deliberately expose their kids to mumps or chickenpox. I could understand the chickenpox parties back before there was a vaccine, but now? Chickenpox kills people. So does mumps. So does measles. So does rubella, or German measles, although it's more likely to just stick a person with a lifetime problem with arthritis. Nonetheless, the anti-vaccine movement is rolling merrily along, promoting pseudoscience while trying to blame vaccination for conditions such as autism that more and more research is indicating are primarily genetic in causation.

In an attempt to fight back against the anti-science crowd, Dr. Paul Offit has written a book defending vaccines. Normally when an author comes out with a book that discusses a hot topic his or her publisher will send the author on a multi-city book tour, arrange for appearances on Oprah or Ellen, readings and signings at major bookstores, and generally get the author out in front of the public. Not in this case. According to the New York Times:

But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats.

Unbelievable.

Note: The photo is of a child suffering from chickenpox. Why would any parent put a kid through that if they could avoid it? (The lesions can also occur on the inside of the mouth and the eyelids.)