Wall Street Journal (April 14)
“Events in Hong Kong and Shanghai have demonstrated that a ‘zero Covid’ strategy can look very effective for a long time—until suddenly it isn’t, either because a more infectious variant changes the game or because success itself breeds overconfidence.” Unless the Chinese government moves “quickly to vaccinate and boost its elderly, and start spending much more heavily on hospital capacity, then the human and economic consequences could be disastrous.”
Tags: Boost, China, Consequences, Disastrous, Elderly, Events, Government, Hong Kong, Hospital capacity, Infectious, Overconfidence, Shanghai, Vaccinate, Variant, Zero COVID
Tampa Bay Times (February 9)
The latest Omicron wave “isn’t receding as quickly as hoped” based on the symmetry of past waves. “By now cases should have fallen to fewer than 5,000 cases a day. Instead, Florida’s daily average was nearly 18,000 cases on Sunday…nearly 270 percent higher than expected had the wave been perfectly symmetrical.” Omicron’s lingering success appears linked to “an abundance of mutations that made the variant about 2.7 to 3. 7 times more infectious than the delta variant in vaccinated households.”
Tags: 000 cases, 18, Delta, Expected, Florida, Higher, Infectious, Lingering, Mutations, Omicron, Receding, Symmetry, Variant, Wave, Waves
San Francisco Chronicle (August 13)
“The wildly infectious delta variant that has raged across the world and forced the United States into a fourth—and in some places unprecedented—surge has reshaped the coronavirus pandemic into a plague that may take many more years to come to an end.”
Tags: Coronavirus, Delta, Infectious, Pandemic, Plague, Raged, Surge, U.S., Unprecedented, Variant
San Francisco Chronicle (July 14)
“With nearly half of California residents still not fully immunized against COVID-19 and the highly infectious delta variant in wide circulation, the state could be facing a surge up to two-thirds the size of last summer’s wave of infection despite generally high vaccination rates.” Any new surge will likely prove “far less deadly and disruptive than what the state endured over the winter when more than 22,000 Californians died between Thanksgiving and the end of January and the state was largely shut down for several months.”
Tags: California, COVID-19, Deadly, Delta variant, Disruptive, Immunized, Infectious, Shut down, Surge, Vaccination rates
The Economist (February 1)
“Two things explain why a new infectious disease is so alarming. One is that, at first, it spreads exponentially…. conjuring speculation about a health-care collapse, social and economic upheaval and a deadly pandemic. The other is profound uncertainty. Sparse data and conflicting reports mean that scientists cannot rule out the worst case—and that lets bad information thrive.”
Tags: Alarming, Collapse, Deadly, Disease, Economic, Exponentially, Health care, Infectious, Pandemic, Social, Speculation, Uncertainty, Upheaval
Newsweek (December 27)
Potential antibiotics discovered in novel places like seabeds, roundworms or even the nose are bringing “hope to the fight against antimicrobial or antibiotic resistance, the growing ability of infectious and sometimes lethal bacteria to survive drug treatment.”
Tags: Antibiotic resistance, Antibiotics, Antimicrobial, Drug treatment, Infectious, Lethal bacteria, Nose, Potential, Roundworms, Seabeds
