Ailing Okinawa

Image from Wikimedia Commons

After taking another look at the news from Okinawa, it looks like Japan is entering another wave with Okinawa prefecture as its epicenter. Okinawa has eclipsed the highest case rate it had in the previous wave.

When I said it’s another wave, I didn’t say it’s another wave of COVID. It’s more than that. Children and young people are also being hammered by multiple types of infections, especially respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and the human metapneumovirus. Both are supposed to be seasonal. Right now is not usually RSV season or human metapheumovirus season in Japan.

With the versions of SARS-CoV-2 up to now, this doesn’t make sense. Something is going on that we don’t understand yet.

COVID damages, exhausts and depletes T-cells in the immune system. That’s well documented. AIDS researchers keep saying they have a sense of déjà vu when they look at it. HIV taught us that when T-cells die or get badly damaged, other diseases see an open door and take advantage.

But it takes time for that to happen. Years. The immune system door doesn’t get kicked wide open immediately by HIV. It gets whittled away a little at a time. Before effective treatments became available, people who caught HIV had what seemed like a bad case of flu, then got over it and seemed to be okay until several years later. Other diseases had to wait a while to get an advantage.

Why is Japan having a simultaneous surge of COVID plus other diseases, even out of their season?

The most likely answer would be that previous waves of COVID were long enough ago for T-cell damage and depletion to create a partially open door, and the same behavior that allows SARS-CoV-2 to spread also allows other airborne pathogens to spread so they can take advantage of the opportunity. If this is indeed the reason for simultaneous surges, it would mean COVID damages the immune system faster than HIV.

There are other possibilities. It’s unlikely to be the nightmare of a new version of the virus which can wipe out the immune system immediately, but with limited information, that should be on the list until it is disproven. Let’s disprove that one first, please.

The rates at which cases (of all the surging diseases) are increasing is high. Outside mainstream media, some scientists are discussing whether Japan is being hit by a new SARS variant. It’s only talk. Nobody has enough hard data to do more than speculate.

It isn’t merely an academic question. There is a substantial USA military presence in the prefecture. If Okinawa has a new flavor of SARS-CoV-2 that’s especially troublesome, it will hop to the USA and heaven knows where else soon through the military connection or tourists or both. It certainly won’t stay confined to Japan.

Ditto for simultaneous surges of multiple diseases. It will happen elsewhere. Considering how allergic mainstream media, many governments and many public health authorities have become to voicing hard truths that connect in any way to the pandemic, it may have happened or may be going on somewhere else without being mentioned much.

Okinawa is ailing and we all need to know why.

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Postscript: The quarterly project review happened in the middle of this week. We got through it. Post-review cleanup is much smaller than preparation for the review.