Autumn Jabs

Some people say dropping pandemic mitigations is for the sake of the economy. That doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For example, recently one person in a hospital admin staff group got COVID. The hospital doesn’t want them wearing masks any more because they aren’t face to face with patients. It is consolidating admin staff in a storage building that was never meant for human occupancy. It hasn’t done anything about poor ventilation in their office and hasn’t installed air filters. How well do you think one case of anything respiratory can stay confined to that person in such a situation?

One case of COVID can put a large swathe of the admin staff out sick at the same time, not to mention the doctors who come into their open plan space regularly to work with their medical secretaries. When they come back from it, their ability to fight everything else will be impaired thanks to damaged T-cells and B-cells. A common cold that used to make them feel a little bad for a few days could put them in bed for a week, as is happening to so many people now. How can anyone say this will help the hospital run better?

It’s the same for any business, university, school, charity or church. More sickness does not make any organization run better. It isn’t good for the economy.

What can we do to avoid participating in such madness? Are we helpless?

No, of course not.

Day to Day

Continuing protective measures in general is still part of our toolkit. Face masks, ventilation, HEPA filters, socializing outdoors with distancing when feasible… Layers of protection do much more than relying on just one silver bullet.

That’s routine stuff. There is something else we can do in this season that isn’t an everyday routine.

Seasonal Autumn Jabs

Vaccinations aren’t our first line of defense. They are our last line of defense if the virus gets through the rest of what we do to fend it off. But they are a whopper of a last resort. Even when imperfect, they are awesome.

Against many diseases, vaccines don’t prevent infection but do reduce severity, dramatically. Vaccines are how we eradicated smallpox. They are how we turned polio from a terrifying scourge every summer to something the World Health Organization thinks we may be able to eradicate. Measles, tetanus (endemic in the soil in some parts of the UK where I live), chickenpox, typhoid fever, pertussis (whooping cough in children)… We no longer pay much attention to a wide range of diseases that used to kill or leave terrible aftereffects in large numbers of people every year. Vaccines have made them less common and made awful aftereffects much less common.

Flu season is starting early this year in both of my countries. I used to get my annual flu vaccination in October. Now it’s in mid-September. Going that early doesn’t seem to be unusual. At least half a dozen other people were at the pharmacy for their appointments when I went for mine. (Last year I got a pneumonia vaccination too, which lasts about ten years.)

Everything else is early too, if it ever fully calmed down for the summer. Most schools in the UK don’t do anything to inhibit the spread of respiratory illnesses. School started and everything respiratory started swirling through communities.

That includes COVID.

The UK is not at all unique in that. If you follow the epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina in Substack, last week she posted an update about the state of the pandemic in the USA.

I follow a few other epidemiologists and medical researchers, too. Like Jetelina, they say the wave that is ramping up now in Europe and the USA is not driven by a new variant. It is a wide mix of variants and subvariants. The experts are talking about convergent evolution that seems focused on spreading very easily, evading our immune systems and escaping from the medications we currently have to treat the disease.

One detail is only mentioned sometimes, but seems important. Some of the flavors of SARS-CoV-2 circulating right now also include traits that made the delta variant especially dangerous. Remember rampant microclots? Yes, that type of thing. Delta wasn’t nearly as contagious as what circulates now. Something as dangerous as delta and as easily spread as omicron, circulating in Europe and the USA at a time of year when people are indoors most of the time, is not a great picture. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it won’t win the contest for flavor of the year, but I’d hate to count on getting lucky.

So… getting vaccinated is generally a really good idea. Autumn is the perfect time of year to top them up ahead of the winter cold and flu season. I’ve gone for mine. How about you?