Dawn beckons as Covid vaccines roll out, but the next few months promise to be the darkest yet, and echoes of the AIDS era

‘One strange aspect of plagues is that they often finish strong. I learned this the hard way last time around. Many people have a general sense of AIDS being terrible in the 1980s and then slowly petering out in the 1990s, as treatments improved. It’s intuitive to think this way, and even to remember things this way. But, in reality, the worst ever year for deaths from AIDS in the US was 1995 — over a decade after the first deaths in America — and just before the arrival of the cocktail therapy that turned everything around. The virus killed more people in America in the year right before the medical breakthrough than in any other previous year.

‘...this [Covid] plague, like many others, could become worse yet before it suddenly turns the corner. The next couple of months may be the most fatal of the entire pandemic — even as freedom from this virus is within sight. There’s a special agony to those deaths, as there will be for all those human beings who will die of a virus for which a vaccine already exists.’

Read here (Genetic Literacy Project, Feb 8, 2021)

More or less deadly? Which way is SARS-CoV-2 evolving?

‘Like plague, Covid-19 is a stealth infection, and that might ultimately slow evolution toward lower virulence. Yersinia pestis, the germ that causes plague, tamps down the early immune response, so that infected people can travel and spread infection for days before they feel sick. Similarly, people infected with SARS-CoV-2 seem capable of infecting others before experiencing any symptoms. This sly mode of viral spread may make the evolution of lower virulence less likely, as infected but asymptomatic people are the perfect mobile viral delivery systems.

‘Yet even without an evolutionary process pushing SARS-CoV-2 towards lower virulence, over time, the virus might affect people differently, said Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. “SARS-CoV-2 may become less deadly, not because the virus changes, but because very few people will have no immunity,” he said. In other words, if you’re exposed to the virus as a child (when it doesn’t seem to make people particularly sick) and then again and again in adulthood, you’ll only get a mild infection. Racaniello points out that the four circulating common cold coronaviruses “all came into humans from animal hosts, and they may have been initially quite virulent.” Now, he says, they infect 90 percent of children at young ages. At later ages, all you get is the common cold.’

Read here (Genetic Literacy Project, Jan 7, 2021)

Case for wearing face masks (4): History -- showing how Wu Lien-Teh from Penang, in the face of racism and widespread doubt, soldiered on to make the face mask an icon of modern healthcare

‘In the fall of 1910, a plague broke out across Manchuria—what we know now as Northern China—which was broken up in politically complex jurisdictions shared between China and Russia...

‘The Chinese Imperial Court brought in a doctor named Lien-teh Wu to head its efforts. He was born in Penang and studied medicine at Cambridge. Wu was young, and he spoke lousy Mandarin. In a plague that quickly attracted international attention and doctors from around the world, he was “completely unimportant,” according to Lynteris. But after conducting an autopsy on one of the victims, Wu determined that the plague was not spread by fleas, as many suspected, but through the air.

‘Expanding upon the surgery masks he’d seen in the West, Wu developed a hardier mask from gauze and cotton, which wrapped securely around one’s face and added several layers of cloth to filter inhalations. His invention was a breakthrough, but some doctors still doubted its efficacy.

‘“There’s a famous incident. He’s confronted by a famous old hand in the region, a French doctor [Gérald Mesny] . . . and Wu explains to the French doctor his theory that plague is pneumonic and airborne,” Lynteris says. “And the French guy humiliates him . . . and in very racist terms says, ‘What can we expect from a Chinaman?’ And to prove this point, [Mesny] goes and attends the sick in a plague hospital without wearing Wu’s mask, and he dies in two days with plague.”

‘Other doctors in the region quickly developed their own masks. “Some are . . . completely strange things,” Lynteris says. “Hoods with glasses, like diving masks.”

‘But Wu’s mask won out because in empirical testing, it protected users from bacteria. According to Lynteris, it was also a great design. It could be constructed by hand out of materials that were cheap and in ready supply. Between January and February of 1911, mask production ramped up to unknown numbers. Medical staff wore them, soldiers wore them, and some everyday people wore them, too. Not only did that help thwart the spread of the plague; the masks became a symbol of modern medical science looking an epidemic right in the eye.’

Read here (Fast Company, March 24, 2020)