My wife and I just returned from Florida about 8 hours ago. I attended a conference in Miami Beach, then spent the day wandering around Miami yesterday. Some anecdotal thoughts:
Flying down on Air Canada, masks were enforced.
We ate outside every meal, with the exception of my conference breakfasts and lunches. These were inside, but well distanced.
The conference was international and my estimates were about 5% masking at the conference.
I skipped all of the evening social events.
The conference reported that there were some positives on the 2nd day, presumably people who needed tests to return home. No numbers were released
We wore N95 or equivalent when inside.
Museum and gallery patrons tended to be masking at a higher rate, up to 50%.
I got my 4th shot at the pharmacy yesterday as CDC rules allow it for healthy 50s, whereas in Ontario it is 60.
Masking at Miami Internaltional was about 25%.
American Airlines on the way home made an announcement that masks are required at all times on flights to Canada, then ignored the 40% of people that ignored it.
This. And again, what’s the cost of wearing a mask? I am buying good KF94 masks that fit my face well for about a dollar apiece, and each one is good for several hours of use. I see no downside at all to wearing them when i go grocery shopping.
Everyone should be doing their own well thought out risk analysis. Instead it seems that a lot of people are looking for a binary, one size fits all solution, and this pandemic doesn’t lend itself to that, but for some reason many refuse to accept or understand this.
A few a told me that I needn’t worry, since I have had four shots - but here’s the thing, I’m a fairly fit, healthy 63 year old and my wife is a 65 year old cancer survivor with a compromised immune system.
Notwithstanding that the trip now isn’t happening, I’ve seen enough descriptions of long-covid. Whereas at 63 years old I can go for a 40 km bike ride daily, for the cost of not wearing a mask in a crowded public space, I do not want to become someone who struggles to climb a flight of stairs.
My wife and I wear masks whenever we’re going to be in a crowd. Canada still requires masks on airplanes and airports. Our province also requires masks in hospitals. Fortunately, for those that have followed vaccination regimen, Covid for the most part is now more like an “ordinary” influenza. The original strain of Covid had roughly 10 times the death rate of ordinary influenza but in higher vaccinated regions I believe the death rate is dramatically lower at least for those that are vaxxed.
There are a couple of misapprehensions here. First, the S glycoprotein (the ‘spike’) is what facilitates the virion entering a cell but it is not what makes the virus pathogenic (causing symptoms and illness); the nucleaocapsid (N) protein is the structure that contains the RNA genome of the virus which allows it to replicate by hijacking the host cell’s transcription machinery, and the open reading frame (ORF) proteins, particularly ORF8, appear to be largely dictating the pathogenicity of the virus while the envelope (E) and membrane (M) proteins seem to regulate intercellular production and transport of the S-proteins, helping to form and export new viral particles, likely contributing to the increased viral loads observed from patients infected with the more aggressive variants.
There is a common misperception that ‘Omicron’ and newer variants are less pathogenic than the ‘Alpha’ and ‘Delta’ variants that drove early waves and so many deaths in developed countries. However, there is no direct evidence (based on in vivo testing or assays of active virus in living tissue) and the epidemiological evidence is suspect because the statistics on testing and hospitalization are focused on developed countries through which early variants already raged, killing swaths of the most vulnerable people prior to vaccine availability and producing natural immune response plus the additional protections against severe morbidity and mortality once vaccines were widely available. Where the ‘Omicron’ variants have spread through novel (previously unexposed) populations that also have poor vaccination levels or poor efficacy vaccines, e.g. North Korea, China, Taiwan, they have produced similar or potentially even higher rates of mortality.
Even having endured an infection by an earlier variant is not a guarantee of mild disease from a subsequent infection; not only do variants appear to operate differently from their predecessors in their preferred tropism (type of cells it infects) but the degree to which they escape prior inoculation varies from patient to patient, with some tolerating reinfection with little effect while others experiencing far more severe infection the second time around. And there is, of course, still the wide unknowns about the duration of ‘long Covid’ effects; I’ve pointed out to people that polio patients have suffered Post-Polio Syndrome decades after the original and often mild infection.
Well, that is the discussion, and as it happens, there is a lot you can do, from wearing a good quality respirator mask, avoiding crowded indoor gatherings and poorly ventilated buildings, being cautious about transmitting the pathogen to immunocompromised or elderly people, et cetera. The reality is that this virus is not going to go away in the foreseeable future nor is it mutating to a benign variant that produces essentially no mortality the way that most ‘common cold’ viruses do (for anyone who is not severely immunocompromised).
I have a friend to is an epidemiologist and molecular biologist trained in virologist working in a nationally recognized university-affiliated research lab who is pretty convinced that we’re going see the emergence of a variant with an order of magnitude greater case fatality rate (something on the order of 3% to 5% instead of 0.3-0.4 %) based upon comparisons with the SARS-CoV(-1) and MERS betacoronavirus genomes and patterns of mutation and genetic shift seen in these variants, and we are in no way prepared for that kind of catastrophic mortality, either in our overstrained medical system and burned out responders, our economic system built on a fragile web of global interdependencies, or our social and educational nets that were already failing long before a mild pandemic illness came along and strained them to the breaking point. You should of course make decisions that are right for you in terms of risks and protections, but also bear in mind that there are larger effects for the spread of contagion than your own personal state of health.