Morven Park and Balls Bluff – Traffic tie-up on I-66 – The AARP summary of the COVID situation – A corrective episode for too much optimism – A surprising source of good news – Evening statistics
I helped RS scout a hike that he is leading on March 22nd. The hike is a double loop in Morven Park and Balls Bluff, both of them very appealing areas. Even though it was colder than yesterday it was much more comfortable, being sunny, clear, and nearly windless. Morven Park features a mansion built in the late 18th century. At one point it was occupied by Westmoreland Davis, who served as Governor of Virginia for 1918-22. The grounds contain several hiking trails, including one that ascends a ridgeline and offers views of mountains to the west. Balls Bluff is built around the site of a Civil War battlefield. The Potomac Heritage Trail skirts alongside it and provides magnificent views of the Potomac from above. The hike is thus of both historical and scenic interest, and it contains a surprising amount of variety within a relatively small compass.
On the way to meeting him I was held up in traffic. An accident occurred that shut down I-66 going westbound for nearly an hour and a half. After I returned home I scanned the news networks on the Internet for more information about it. One would think that an accident that caused a 3-mile-long tie-up on a major traffic artery during morning rush hour would generate some headlines, but apparently such an event is not considered newsworthy. I could not find a single outlet that even mentioned the incident.
The latest AARP Bulletin devoted some space to the current situation with respect to COVID. The topic is certainly of interest to senior citizens, since about 90% of Americans who died from COVID were 50 or older. Some of the article’s conclusions are not particularly surprising. Vaccination, for instance, is strenuously recommended. People in the 65-79 age group are 20 times as likely to die from COVID if they haven’t been vaccinated. Natural immunity (as a result of recovering from COVID) is not to be relied upon: it fades over time in the same manner that the immunity conferred from chickenpox in childhood fades, necessitating vaccination for shingles, a disease caused by re-emergence of the chickenpox virus. Progress has been made in pharmaceutical remedies, but even emergency use authorization from the FDA for them is still pending. Vaccine mandates, unpopular though they may be, have been reasonably effective. Several, of course, refuse to take a vaccine under any circumstances, But others, although they may be anti-vaxxers in principle, are not prepared to go so far as to lose their jobs over the matter. United Airlines dismissed less than 1% of its employees for non-compliance. Novant Health, a hospital system with 35,000 employees, had to dismiss only 175 of them. In Washington state, less than 35 of the 63,000 workforce chose to quit rather than to take the vaccine.
The factor that remains the greatest mystery is so-called “long COVID,” in which patients suffer from symptoms months after the infection has run its course. It is apparently more common than it was previously believed to be. One survey of 273,000 COVID survivors found that 37% had one or more COVID symptoms 3-6 months after infection. The risk increases with age. For people over 65, 61% had symptoms such as breathing difficulty from damaged lungs, cognitive issues (brain fog and memory), muscle pain, and fatigue. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist who is a professor of Duke University, admits that not much progress has been made in figuring out why some patients wind up with long COVID and others do not,. “I can predict with some accuracy who’s going to get sick enough with COVID to wind up in the hospital. It’s proportional to your age, your weight, to how bad your hearts or lungs are at the beginning, how bad your diabetic control is. I have yet to find a good way of predicting who gets long COVID. I have no idea how that pans out.”
The overall mood continues to be optimistic. Insurers offering health plans via the Affordable Care Act marketplaces must file plans offering to justify their premiums. The majority of these are predicting that COVID will have no effect on their 2022 costs. That prediction would appear to be justified at any rate in the coastal regions, where most of our largest cities are located and where the vaccination rate is high. Areas that have a vaccination rate of only 40%-50% (there are quite a number of these, mainly in the nation’s interior) are naturally more at risk. But the aggregate number of vaccinated people is reasonably high, treatments are better, people are more likely to wear masks in situations that involve being indoors with the general public. “We’re absolutely better,” says Wolfe, “than we were a year ago.”
All of this is very encouraging, but it will not do to be over-confident at this stage. One recent episode may be taken as an illustration. Christian Caberra, aged 40, contracted the virus during the Christmas holidays. Shortly after testing positive, he was hospitalized for pneumonia in both lungs. “I can’t breathe again,” he texted his brother, Jino Caberra. “I really regret not getting my vaccine. If I can do it all over again I would do it in a heartbeat to save my life. I’m fighting for my life here.” His struggles were in vain; he died on January 22nd. Los Angeles, where Caberra lived, has been particularly hard-hit by the virus. On January 20th, it reported 102 deaths. As of January 24th, it has been facing 33,000 new infections daily. No wonder that Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the city’s public health director, said last week: “Let’s not fool ourselves by not recognizing the danger presented by the Omicron variant, which is capable of spreading with lightning speed and causing serious illness among our most vulnerable residents.”
There is good news from, of all of the places in the world, Myanmar. It has reported no COVID-related deaths for three consecutive days. Its infection rate is quite low, affecting less than 1% of the country’s population. At this point, a citizen of Myanmar is in greater danger of being shot to death or falling victim to an airstrike by its current government than from dying of COVID; the number of civilian deaths since the military takeover is well over 1,000.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 362,859,116; # of deaths worldwide: 5,644,733; # of cases U.S.: 74,121,996; # of deaths; U.S.: 898,294.