Covid updates and articles

Publishing another post that's been sitting around. Good links here. 

The year in covid - 2021. Lots of people got vaccinated. There were a few scares with the vaccines, particularly rare blood clots from the Johnson&Johnson (very rare), and heart inflammation (myocarditis), mostly in younger men (somewhat rare). Summer brought a wave of the delta variant. Vaxxed people had some breakthrough cases, but few hospitalizations or deaths. Stupid red states like Texas had a ton of hospitalizations and deaths. And the anti-vaxxers remained dubious even with all the real-life info. The omicron wave started in November and surged fast, wiping out a lot of Christmas and New Year's plans. It was very contagious, but having a recent booster turned out still be quite protective. My family all got booster by December, so we had no covid cases here. 

Now the links:

An article about how masks protect. 

But the best explanation has come from private communication with an acquaintance with a PhD in molecular biology and decades of experience in pharmaceuticals and drug testing. He writes how masks are very helpful even though viruses are so small, 

A respiratory droplet contains water proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and if someone is infectious, SARS-VoV-2 virus.

When they very rapidly evaporate, what gets left behind is a hydrated particle of proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and virus.

It's not naked virus. It is much larger than the cold virus, although still small enough to remain airborne.

And yes, those droplet nuclei can pass fairly easily through a mask. I pointed that out of my original extended reply to you. That's why masks do a poor job of protecting the person wearing them.

But the point is that masks do quite a good job of trapping large respiratory droplets at the source, before they have a chance to evaporate into airborne droplet nuclei.

That's the point. Respiratory droplets get caught at the source before they have a chance to evaporate into droplet nuclei, which remain suspended in the air, and are quite effective at infecting other people.

The heartache of being a covid doctor. How huge the omicron wave was.  What it was like in Kansas City. 

Excellent resource. The report from the independent panel reviewing the Pfizer vaccine test data. Loads of info, like how many subjects were hospitalized. 

So the big ivermectin guru, Dr. Pierre Kory, got covid even though he was following his preventative protocol. Why he didn't change his advice--bias, of course.

Image: pewtrusts.org

Canada's Freedom Convoy

 Catching up on this old story. 

So a lot of truckers in Canada got together to protest mandatory covid vaccination in late January. They convoyed across Canada and descended on Ottawa to protest at parliament. Like a lot of anti-vaxxers, they were long on shouting conspiracy theories and very short on data and realism. They ruined the quality of life in the neighborhoods where they lined the streets with their trucks idling and polluting, blowing their horns at high volume, and generally being annoying to the point that murder was conceivable. 

Of course they were cheered on by US anti-vaxxers. Their fundraising may have been largely from Americans. But at some point, the government shut down their fundraising and seized the money, if I remember correctly. 

This was perhaps the biggest showdown between anti-vaxxers and a national government, so the whole world watched. I hoped it would fail so that US truckers weren't encouraged to pull the same shit here. Eventually, the mild-mannered Canadians got fed up with the US-style raucous rednecks, and clamped down hard. Some police sabotaged extra vehicles, Police surrounded them and managed to get them to disperse. Oh, yeah, Trudeau (the baby prime minister son of a former prime minister) invoked some emergency powers to have the legal tools to arrest scofflaws and throw them in jail. After a bit of grandstanding, he won a vote backing the powers. 

So it went from a cause celebre to a fizzle. Americans tried to copy it, but it never ascended very far and then fizzled. The Canadian protest didn't launch an Arab Spring or anything close to it. But we didn't know if it might. Remember this as only a year after the Jan. 6 coup attempt in Washington DC, so rebellion was still in the air. It could have ignited, but luckily it didn't. No one needs a rebellion based on stupidity and ridiculous internet claims. Also, Russia invaded Ukraine a few weeks later, so Canadian idiots were no longer the biggest news story in the world. Real issues took over. 

Sources: Aggrieved entitlement. White nationalism among the protest leaders. The emergency declaration. The police tighten the circle around the protesters. The biggest outrage was a woman being trampled to death by a mounted officer, but that was a huge exaggeration of the incident. Not even a serious injury. I recognize this blowing issues out of total proportion. 

Image: nbcnews.com