COVID myths versus facts
This is continued from Part one: The infuriating, avoidable, destructive disaster of COVID and the cybersecurity industry and Part two: COVID if it was a cyber threat, a timeline of events.
Myth: “COVID is over!”
Fact: According to John Hopkins University data, as of June 16th, 2022, daily new confirmed COVID cases are increasing in the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, the UK, and many other countries. The United States alone is having over 100,000 new confirmed cases, day by day.
And that’s just confirmed cases. Many cases are likely being missed due to people testing with Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) performed at home, rather than Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests performed by medical facilities which are obligated to report. From Nicole Grigg in January 2022:
“As testing demand continues to rise, an Arizona State University expert in biomedical diagnostics estimates there are at least 4 million home tests and other rapid tests that aren’t reported each day. However, it’s unclear how many of those tests are positive.
ASU professor Mara Aspinall says reporting those results relies on an honor system for each person to report it themselves.
‘For the home tests, there is no organized and formal and required way to report those tests,’ she said. ‘Today, unfortunately, there is no way to definitively know how many of those at-home tests are positive. We are likely catching some of them.’
It’s believed some people report results to their primary care physician, who then notifies the local county health department.
‘Probably 50% of people who have primary care physicians report [test results] to their primary care physician,’ Aspinall said. ‘That is a best-case estimate.’
Some states do not have a system in place for self-reporting results of at-home tests.”
Myth: “COVID is mild!”
This myth was largely propagated by the CDC and our other corporate overlords, in an effort to get us to return to our workplaces to commence more monitorable wage slavery.
From March 2022 via Reuters:
“The chief executives of American Airlines (AAL.O), United Airlines (UAL.O), Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) and other carriers on Wednesday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to end a federal mask mandate on airplanes and international pre-departure testing requirements.
The airline executives, including the chairman of Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) and JetBlue’s (JBLU.O) CEO, said in a letter the restrictions ‘are no longer aligned with the realities of the current epidemiological environment.’”
And then Reuters reported in May 2022:
“The mask mandate had been due to expire on Tuesday just before midnight unless the CDC sought an extension of a Transportation Security Administration directive.
A CDC spokeswoman said, ‘As a result of a court order, the mask order is no longer in effect and is not being enforced.’
At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cast doubt on the idea that the administration wanted to reimpose the mask mandate.
‘The appeal concerns whether the CDC has the authority to (require masks) in this pandemic or in any pandemic, which is completely distinct from whether a mask mandate ought to be applied any given day,’ Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg said he agreed that based on conditions on April 13 when the mandate was extended for 15 days that it should have been allowed to expire but said it was a CDC decision.
Hours after the April 18 ruling, the Biden administration said it would no longer enforce the mask mandate, which prompted airlines to let passengers end wearing masks mid-flight. Passengers report now that on some flights 10% or fewer air travellers are wearing masks.”
Fact: Actions have consequences. Now airlines which have dropped mask mandates are cancelling lots and lots of flights due to COVID-related staff shortages. From Forbes in June 2022:
“The first major holiday weekend is in the books. Memorial Day weekend and the weeks leading up to it have shown how U.S. travel is going to go this summer. And unless you like cancellations, delays, crowds, bad service, and higher prices, it is not a pretty picture.
More than 7000 flights were cancelled over the Memorial Day weekend. If one assumes that there were 100 people on each flight (a low number considering that a typical Boeing 737–800 seats between 162 to 189 people) at least 700,000 people were delayed, inconvenienced, paid more for a new ticket, or gave up.
Delta was one of many airlines with multiple cancellations. As the Atlanta Journal Constitution said of their hometown airline, ‘Facing weather disruptions, short-staffing and an increase in COVID-19 cases among its employees, Atlanta-based Delta is cutting flights over the Memorial Day holiday period and through the summer.’
COVID appears to be on the rise again, but Americans are flying again, with no more mask mandates.”
COVID is not, and is never “mild.” If you think you’re lucky because your bout of COVID had relatively manageable symptoms, you’re still likely to develop long term medical troubles. From MedicalXpress on June 16th, 2022 (the day I’m writing this blog):
“More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, scientists have become increasingly aware of a group of patients — so-called ‘long haulers’ — who remain plagued by a combination of symptoms long after the infection passes. In a study published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) describe their findings related to their multidisciplinary clinical work in this area.
‘Commonly, patients with long COVID present with brain fog, a vague description including lack of sleep, anxiety, depression and a history of headache or migraine combined with trouble with attention and word finding difficulties as well as executive dysfunction,’ says Zeina Chemali, MD, MPH, director, Neuropsychiatry Clinics and Training at MGH, and medical director of the McCance Center for Brain Health. ‘In the patients we treated with long COVID who presented with brain fog, we found that the root cause of this commonly used term is often multifactorial.’
In their study conducted over 15 months from February 2020-May 2021, Chemali and colleagues followed 87 confirmed and 13 presumed cases of non-hospitalized individuals with lasting symptoms beyond six months after COVID-19 infection.”
Being a COVID “long hauler” is otherwise known as having Long COVID — a permanent, debilitating combination of disabilities and medical problems from a previous COVID infection. And having had a supposedly “mild” bout of COVID doesn’t make you any less likely to develop Long COVID.
Research was published in January 2022, titled “Long COVID following mild SARS-CoV-2 (COVID) infection: characteristic T cell alterations and response to antihistamines.” Here’s the abstract if you’re ready for some medical jargon:
“Long COVID is characterized by the emergence of multiple debilitating symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Its etiology is unclear and it often follows a mild acute illness. Anecdotal reports of gradual clinical responses to histamine receptor antagonists (HRAs) suggest a histamine-dependent mechanism that is distinct from anaphylaxis, possibly mediated by T cells, which are also regulated by histamine. T cell perturbations have been previously reported in post-viral syndromes, but the T cell landscape in patients who have recovered from mild COVID-19 and its relationship to both long COVID symptoms and any symptomatic response to HRA remain underexplored.
We addressed these questions in an observational study of 65 individuals who had recovered from mild COVID-19. Participants were surveyed between 87 and 408 days after the onset of acute symptoms; none had required hospitalization, 16 had recovered uneventfully, and 49 had developed long COVID. Symptoms were quantified using a structured questionnaire and T cell subsets enumerated in a standard diagnostic assay. Patients with long-COVID had reduced CD4+ and CD8+ effector memory (EM) cell numbers and increased PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) expression on central memory (CM) cells, whereas the asymptomatic participants had reduced CD8+ EM cells only and increased CD28 expression on CM cells.
72% of patients with long COVID who received HRA reported clinical improvement, although T cell profiling did not clearly distinguish those who responded to HRA. This study demonstrates that T cell perturbations persist for several months after mild COVID-19 and are associated with long COVID symptoms.”
Myth: “We’ve got to learn to live with COVID.”
Fact: Let’s dig into Long COVID a bit deeper, shall we?
From The Atlantic’s Benjamin Mazer on June 15th, 2022:
“In late summer 2021, during the Delta wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation issued a disturbing wake-up call: According to its calculations, more than 11 million Americans were already experiencing long COVID. The academy’s dashboard has been updated daily ever since, and now pegs that number at 25 million.
Even this may be a major undercount. The dashboard calculation assumes that 30 percent of COVID patients will develop lasting symptoms, then applies that rate to the 85 million confirmed cases on the books. Many infections are not reported, though, and blood antibody tests suggest that 187 million Americans had gotten the virus by February 2022. (Many more have been infected since.) If the same proportion of chronic illness holds, the country should now have at least 56 million long-COVID patients. That’s one for every six Americans.
So much about long COVID remains mysterious: The condition is hard to study, difficult to predict, and variously defined to include a disorienting range and severity of symptoms. But the numbers above imply ubiquity — a new plait in the fabric of society. As many as 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant. A similar number have acne, allergies, hearing loss, or chronic pain. Think of all the people you know personally who experience one of these conditions. Now consider what it would mean for a similar number to have long COVID: Instead of having blemishes, a runny nose, or soy milk in the fridge, they might have difficulty breathing, overwhelming fatigue, or deadly blood clots.
Even if that 30 percent estimate is too high — even if the true rate at which people develop post-acute symptoms were more like 10 or 5 or even 2 percent, as other research suggests — the total number of patients would still be staggering, many millions nationwide. As experts and advocates have observed, the emergence of long COVID would best be understood as a ‘mass disabling event’ of historic proportions, with the health-care system struggling to absorb an influx of infirmity, and economic growth blunted for years to come.
Indeed, if — as these numbers suggest — one in six Americans already has long COVID, then a tidal wave of suffering should be crashing down at this very moment, all around us. Yet while we know a lot about COVID’s lasting toll on individuals, through clearly documented accounts of its life-altering effects, the aggregate damage from this wave of chronic illness across the population remains largely unseen. Why is that?
A natural place to look for a mass disabling event would be in official disability claims — the applications made to the federal government in hopes of getting financial support and access to health insurance. Have those gone up in the age of long COVID?
In 2010, field offices for the Social Security Administration received close to 3 million applications for disability assistance. The number dropped off at a steady rate in the years that followed, as the population of working-age adults declined and the economy improved after the Great Recession, down to just about 2 million in 2019. Then came COVID. In 2020 and 2021, one-third of all Americans became infected with SARS-CoV-2, and a significant portion of those people developed chronic symptoms. Yet the number of applications for disability benefits did not increase. In fact, since the start of the pandemic, disability claims have dropped by 10 percent overall, a rate of decline that matches up almost exactly with the one present throughout the 2010s.”
This all could have been avoided. We shouldn’t have to “live with COVID.” Countries that value the health of their citizens over the almighty dollar have been much less impacted by COVID. Vietnam should be a global role model. Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization praised Vietnam’s response:
“With coronavirus infections in the mere hundreds, Vietnam’s response to the crisis has earned praise from the World Health Organization.
Official statistics show there are currently more than 75,000 people in quarantine or isolation. The country has so far conducted more than 121,000 tests, from which only 260 cases were confirmed.
As yet, there have been no virus-related deaths, and infection rates remain significantly lower than in South Korea, Singapore and even Taiwan — nations that have all been widely praised in global media for their effective responses to the pandemic.
Kidong Park, the WHO’s representative to Vietnam, believes the country’s early response to the crisis was critical.
‘Vietnam responded to this outbreak early and proactively. Its first risk assessment exercise was conducted in early January — soon after cases in China started being reported,’ Park says.”
You’re probably thinking, “That was April 2020! What about 2022?” Sure thing! From Viet Nam News:
“Some prominent omissions in the latest official set of COVID-19 rules is that there is no longer a requirement for the COVID-19 vaccination or recent recovery certificates, multiple tests required before and after entry, or the need to comply with restrictions like avoiding gathering or keeping safe distance, like in previous proposed plans from the ministry.
The guidelines, released after the country fully reopened international tourism activities and reinstated pre-pandemic entry and exit regulations, replace all other previous COVID-19 rules for foreign entries and the health ministry asks local authorities and State agencies to quickly direct the implementation of the COVID rules to avoid spreading the virus among the travellers and the community.
It is hoped the relaxed regulations will ease concerns from international tour companies who have been desperate to welcome back foreign tourists into the country after two years of severe disruptions caused by the pandemic.
With these new COVID-19 guidelines, international visitors entering Việt Nam will be ‘treated the same way’ as domestic visitors, as Deputy Prime Minister Vũ Đức Đam has promised late Wednesday.
The health ministry also noted that the new daily COVID-19 increases in Việt Nam remains significant and Omicron variant has been circulating in the community, however, with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, hospitalizations and deaths from the virus remain at manageable levels, and the guidelines are part of the efforts to safely adapt to, and flexibly and effectively control COVID-19.”
The mass disabling event of Long COVID could have been avoided. But I refuse to “live with COVID,” which leads to likely permanent brain damage from Long COVID. As of this writing on June 16th, 2022, I haven’t had COVID once. I test twice per week. What’s my “secret?” I avoid the public. I live in a solo human household. I buy everything online. I limit my contact with the public. I take a taxi service with a mask mandate instead of public transit. And my N95 mask stays on every second that I’m not in my condo.
Myth: “Everyone’s going to get COVID eventually. Get infected now, so you’ll be immune from getting it later.”
COVID infection doesn’t grant any immunity to future COVID infections. In fact, COVID infections make future COVID infections even worse. This has been proven in recent medical research. From HealthDay on June 16th, 2022, about a study published in Science:
“If you battled a COVID-19 infection early in the pandemic, it probably won’t protect you much from reinfection with Omicron and its subvariants, a new study warns.
Even a previous infection with the original Omicron variant provides little protection against reinfection, researchers report.
They said the findings from their study of more than 730 triple-vaccinated health care workers in the United Kingdom may help explain why Omicron reinfection is so common, The Guardian reported.
‘If you were infected during the first wave, then you can’t boost your immune response if you have an Omicron infection,’ study co-author Rosemary Boyton, a professor at Imperial College London, told the newspaper.
Boyton also noted that when ‘Omicron started flying around the country, people kept saying, that’s OK, that will improve people’s immunity,’ but ‘what we’re saying is it’s not a good booster of immunity.’
It’s believed that COVID variants such as Omicron have mutations in their spike protein that help them evade immune responses, but these findings show the situation is more complex, according to co-author Danny Altmann, a professor at Imperial College London.
‘It’s actually worse than that, because the adaptations that the spike [protein] has now are actually inducing a kind of regulation or shutdown of immune response,’ he told The Guardian.
This study focused on Omicron BA.1, but similar findings are likely for other Omicron subvariants, Altmann noted.
We’re ‘not getting herd immunity, we’re not building up protective immunity to Omicron,’ he said. ‘So we face not coming out the other end of infections and reinfections and breakthrough infections.’
The study was published June 14 in the journal Science.”
Myth: “I don’t have to worry, I’ve been vaccinated.”
Fact: Recent scientific research demonstrates that the vaccines we got in 2021 based on 2020 versions of COVID aren’t very effective against current strains of COVID. From “Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness against the Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant” published in April 2022’s abstract:
“Background: A rapid increase in coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) cases due to the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in highly vaccinated populations has aroused concerns about the effectiveness of current vaccines.
Methods: We used a test-negative case-control design to estimate vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England. Vaccine effectiveness was calculated after primary immunization with two doses of BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech), ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca), or mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccine and after a booster dose of BNT162b2, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, or mRNA-1273.
Conclusions: Primary immunization with two doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 vaccine provided limited protection against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron variant. A BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 booster after either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 primary course substantially increased protection, but that protection waned over time. (Funded by the U.K. Health Security Agency.)”
We could have avoided this mess if Bill Gates and other powers-that-be hadn’t interfered with global vaccination efforts in 2021 in the name of patents and profits. Now we need Omicron vaccines… yesterday. Meanwhile, we must behave as if we weren’t vaccinated.
Myth: “Masks don’t work. Mask mandates don’t work.”
Fact: Masks, if worn properly covering the mouth and nose, have been scientifically proven to greatly reduce COVID transmission, especially N95 masks. From Professor John Drake in Forbes:
“The new study, conducted by the California Department of Public Health and published in the CDC’s journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was a case-control design. People who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were demographically matched against other people who were not positive. Both groups were asked about their masking behavior in the preceding two weeks.
Statistical analysis showed that the odds of infection were about half for people who reported wearing a mask in public compared with people who didn’t. (Results of this study are reported in terms of “odds ratios” which are related to relative risk, but not quite the same thing.) For people who wore masks “all of the time” (instead of ‘some of the time’ or ‘most of the time’) the estimated effect was even more significant.
A second part of the study sought to differentiate between cloth masks, surgical masks, and N95/KN95 respirators. Not unexpectedly, N95/KN95s were found to reduce the odds of infection compared with people who didn’t wear any mask. To me, the surprising thing is how effective they were, reducing the relative odds by 83%. Cloth masks and surgical masks were found to be less effective.”
If what happened to the airline industry from removing mask mandates isn’t proof enough for you, here’s more data about why mask mandates are effective and absolutely necessary when it comes to controlling the pandemic. From Jing Huang PhD via Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s PolicyLab:
“In our newly published Health Affairs study, we used a matching method to study the impact of mask mandates on COVID-19 case incidence at the county level between March and October 2020. Since mask mandates are most likely to be enacted when cases are surging, the timing may align with changes in other factors, such as the public starting to reduce social activities and increase personal hygiene practices. Any change in case incidence before and after a mask mandate is put in place could actually be due to (confounded by) those other factors.
Moreover, a mask mandate may have different effects depending on the characteristics of the community in which it is enacted (e.g., population density, acceptance of mask wearing). Therefore, for every county we included in our study, we used a matching strategy to find a control county that had similar population density, acceptance towards mask wearing, and number of cases, but no mask mandate. We ended up with two groups of counties that were comparable in demographics and pandemic severity, but one group had mask mandates during our study period while the other did not. We then followed the two groups for a few weeks to evaluate the effect of the mandate by comparing the difference between paired counties.
It’s worth noting that if all the counties had mask mandates at the same time, we would not be able to do such matching. The variation in timing of the enactment of masking mandates at the county level during the early months of the pandemic offered an opportunity to assess this impact via our matching study design. The figure below is a visual representation of our matching procedure.
What we found from this study was that counties that introduced a mask mandate early on in the pandemic experienced lower county-level COVID-19 case incidence in the six weeks following enactment as compared to similar counties without a mandate. How much the mask mandate benefited communities varied across counties and over time, with the strongest effects seen in more crowded communities or those with a reticence toward voluntary masking. We also observed that case incidence declined the most between the third and fourth weeks after the mandate started and the effect of the mandate waned between weeks six and eight in some counties.”
Part four: Firsthand experiences of COVID in the cybersecurity industry
