COVID-19

Britain’s vaccine success in the midst of a pandemic

The early story of Britain’s reaction to COVID-19 was an unmitigated disaster, driven in part by uniformed cabinet discussions of herd immunity. Even Prime Minister Boris Johnston himself was infected with COVID-19. As if this story was not difficult enough, a new variant of COVID-19 appeared in Essex towards the end of 2020. We now know that not only is this variant more communicable, but also may be more deadly. In late December this virus came to dominate all the COVID-19 clades in Britain, and caused a remarkable surge in infections.

In spite of this difficult history, Britain has pulled of two remarkable achievements. First, it has conducted outstanding genomic surveillance. While Denmark was also doing so, it was the British tracking which revealed the extent of the threat these new variants posed. Now other nations, such as the United States, are playing catch-up, as they try to create an effective system for genomic surveillance. Even more remarkable, Britain has joined a short list of nations (along with Israel and the United Arab Emirates) leading the global race to vaccinate their populations. How was this success achieved?

Paul Waldie has a remarkable article in Canada’s Globe and Mail, titled “How Britain became a world leader in COVID-19 vaccine distribution – despite other pandemic problems.” In Waldie’s narrative one remarkable woman, Kate Bingham, and the task force that she led, managed to identify the likely winners in the vaccine race, negotiate contracts, and bring vaccine production home to Britain. What is most impressive is how proactive the task force was. Britain has had many missteps and still faces many challenges. Yet when the history of this pandemic is written, I think that -based on Waldie’s description- this task forces’ actions will be held up as a case-study of effective leadership during a crisis.

Shawn Smallman

Two pandemics: Ghosts of the 1918 outbreak

Recently I’ve been reading a book (published in 2004) by Betty O’Keefe and Ian McDonald titled, Dr Fred and the Spanish Lady. The work examines the experience of Dr. Fred Underhill, who was the senior public health officer in Vancouver during the 1918 pandemic. While there had been a host of influenza pandemics through history, the 1918 pandemic killed perhaps 100 million people globally.

What struck me while reading the work was the manifold similarities between our experience of COVID-19 and that of almost exactly a century before. During our current pandemic some countries, such as Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan, acted quickly to enact travel restrictions. But that was the exception rather than the norm. Similarly, in 1918 troop ships brought influenza to Canada, even though during the crossings the ships would have to repeatedly stop for the burial of sea for returning soldiers (O-Keefe and MacDonald, 30-31). In 1918, travel restrictions were not implemented because everyone in Canada wanted to bring the troops home. While understandable, this was also tragic. During COVID-19 there were no effective limits on returning citizens in the United States, likely because there just was not enough public support for this measure. Of course, there were limits on non-citizens’ travel. But since the SARS-Cov2 virus does not discriminate based on citizenship, those countries that did not limit their citizen’s movement, and quarantine them on arrival, have paid a heavy price. …

How quickly can you catch COVID-19?

Throughout the last several months, the US Center for Disease Control has messaged that in order to catch COVID-19 you had to be within six feet of an infected person for fifteen minutes. This was reassuring information. But sadly the US was also perhaps in a difficult place to answer detailed questions about COVID cases, because the contact tracing system has been overwhelmed. The US has also lacked a national COVID tracking app, as many other nations (Australia) have had. Realistically, this would have been a political impossibility to implement in the US, given that even masks have been highly politicized here. So, how realistic was the CDC’s guidance?

The CDC itself pointed to a case in Vermont in which a masked corrections officer was infected with COVID even though he never spent more than a single minute with infected prisoners. Instead, he spent perhaps a total of 17 minutes in a day with them over the course of multiple brief visits, all of which were captured on video. He also wore a mask, gown, and goggles. The prisoners sometimes wore their masks, and sometimes not. After this case, the CDC changed its rules to reflect cumulative exposure. Still, the fifteen minute rule still held. But would new information change these guidelines?

In Korea, contact tracing has been highly effective. It turns out that the combination of a digital tracking app with highly skilled contact tracers has been more successful than either purely digital or human tracing would be. And what Korea has learned -in a remarkable piece of scientific work- is that in one case a high school senior was infected after five minutes of exposure and from twenty feet away. The infection took place in a restaurant (which had video recording) and it turns out that an air conditioning unit was wafting air from an infected person towards the student. The quality of the data that the contact tracers obtained -and the history of how they learned it- is remarkable, and well worth reading.

There is nothing magic that happens at the six feet mark from another person. And being exposed to an infected person indoors can be risky even when the CDC’s old guidelines might make us feel safe. In this case, Korea has given us not only important information, but also let us see the quality of information contact tracing can provide. The key message is that neither six feet of distance, or avoiding more than fifteen minutes of exposure to another person, may be enough to keep you safe from infection, particularly indoors. So indoor dining is probably always unsafe.

Shawn Smallman

Do we already have a vaccine to prevent COVID-19?

Bust and Plaque at the Fighting SARS memorial, Hong Kong

A recent study published in the American Journal of Microbiology journal, MBIO, suggests that MMR 2 vaccine helps to prevent COVID-19 symptoms. It’s a study based on a small population (80), but the MMR blood titers show a very strong association with the severity of COVID-19 illness. People with high titers were all asymptomatic. Everyone who became severely ill had titers under 32. This wasn’t the first article exploring this idea of an association between MMR vaccination and COVID-19 resistance. But it’s an intriguing one that deserves more attention and research.

As a press release from the American Journal of Microbiology states, this could also explain why children don’t seem to get seriously ill. The MMR blood titers fall as you age. And the elderly may never have had this vaccine, in part because they’ve had measles or mumps. One significant point to the study was that having had the mumps doesn’t protect you. People need to have the vaccine itself. This contradicts the argument of vaccine critics who say that it’s better to have natural immunity. But in this case, the vaccine seems to give better immunity. As someone who had mumps as a child (and then gave it to my sister) I’m in favor of a vaccine-based approach to public health, rather than natural or herd-immunity.

I want to emphasize again that this study was based on the MMR blood titer results of only eighty people who had COVID-19. So this is a preliminary study. But the risks of the MMR are very low; at least hundreds of millions of people have had it since it was first introduced in 1971. Please note that this study only examined the MMR 2, not the quad vax, which also includes varicella.

Even though new COVID vaccines are coming soon, it will take months to roll the out at scale. It would be wonderful if we could use an existing vaccine with a long track record for safety to help us to buy time.

Shawn Smallman

COVID-19 in Latin America

Years ago I wrote a book on the HIV pandemic in Latin America, which focused on the diversity of epidemics within the region. How could one virus cause such a diversity of outbreaks? Of course it’s impossible to discuss an epidemic without considering human behavior, which we certainly see now with COVID-19. What’s interesting to me is the contrast between Africa, where the death rate has been relatively low, and the severe outbreaks in some Latin American states. Two of my colleagues and I discussed Latin America’s experience with the outbreak in late May, on a panel that focused on Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Of course, much has happened since then, from the terrible outbreak in Peru, to the mounting challenges faced by Argentina. Still, the broad strokes about how these nations responded to the pandemic has remained similar, such as the populism and denial of Brazil’s President Bolsonaro. You can view our panel here on YouTube.

Ethiopia, Innovation and COVID-19

In Taiwan, before entering museums (and many other public institutions, offices, etc.), one needs to enter the Real-Name System (with one’s cellphone, by scanning the QR Code), on top of getting one’s temperature taken / sanitize hands with alcohol. By leaving one’s name and contact information, if a person got infected by COVID-19 and have been to the museum, the government will know who he / she have been in contact with. Photo by Isabella Mori.

One of the realizations that has come with COVID-19 is that the old binary between developed and developing countries is deeply flawed. Some nations that are less wealthy (Vietnam, Thailand) have succeeded very well in limiting the virus’s spread (at least in June 2020), while some wealthier countries (the United States and Great Britain saw their governments fail to control the outbreak, despite not only their relative wealth, but also sophisticated health care systems.

In the United States the CDC and FDA decided not to adopt a test for COVID-19 that was recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). But their effort to create their own test was badly flawed. When that test proved not to work, it set the US testing back perhaps a month or more behind other nations at the most critical moment in the virus’s spread within the United States. In contrast, countries that adopted the WHO’s recommended test were able to test their populations at scale.

In Boston, there was a testing debacle after a number of people were infected at a Biogen conference. Even after people reported symptoms and repeatedly sought testing they were unable to be tested, because they did not meet the overly strict criteria that included travel to China, or contact with someone from China. The result was a disaster, which saw the outbreak flare so that Boston had one of the worst outbreaks in the world. Meanwhile, Vietnam carried out a very thorough testing program that has allowed to control the outbreak to this date.

One of the most interesting points for me has been the relative difference in innovation between some developing countries and the United States, which is the home of Silicon Valley. In the U.S. there is still no national contact tracing app. Instead individual states (such as North and South Dakota) have had develop their own. But at a national level, the rate of innovation has been painfully slow. In contrast, some developing countries have moved with amazing speed. One of the success stories has been Ethiopia. As Simon Marks described in an article on the Voice of America website, Ethiopian developers quickly created seven different apps to help with everything from contact tracing to supporting health care workers. What is clear is that the size of nation’s economy does not necessarily correspond to its ability to innovate and adapt. American exceptionalism aside, wealthy nations must overcome the hubris and sense of exceptionalism, which have hampered their response to the pandemic. When developed nations take an interest in the the innovations in places from Ethiopia to Thailand, their own response will improve.

A few years ago, I was in Hong Kong, Macau and Shenzhen. When I asked at a coffee shop in Hong Kong if I could pay with a credit card, the clerk said that they could do that. Would I mind waiting while they took the machine out from the cupboard? It would take just a minute to find the keys to the cupboard. At this point, I was embarrassed and ask them not to. But they wanted to help me, and insisted on hooking up the credit card machine for the foreigner. But credit cards felt antiquated in a world in people used WeChat to pay for their subway cards, get their groceries, and order deliveries. People never had touch a device to put in a PIN. When I came back, I realized how antiquated our entire payment architecture is. I think about this during the pandemic every time I go to a gas station or department store and have to first swipe a card, and then put in my PIN on a grungy pad. Of course this is the tip of the iceberg. Why do I still need to pay bills with a check in an age of Venmo and Paypal? In Australia checks have nearly disappeared as a payment form, and it has been more than a decade since most people used one. Five years ago I was talking with an Australian. She said that she was stunned when she moved to the U.S. and people still wanted checks. And why do forms in the US still ask for my department’s fax number?

In Shenzhen I saw the sophisticated drones, electronic devices, and pristine infrastructure. Afterwards when I traveled to New York and saw the state of the airport, it felt like traveling twenty years back in time. In the United States, there is a sense of exceptionalism, which equates modernity and power with being American. But from Asia to Africa there are innovations, technologies and approaches that Western nations -particularly the United States and Britain- would benefit from adopting, particularly during this pandemic. It’s not that the developed/developing binary doesn’t isn’t useful in some circumstances. But in some respects it can conceal more than it reveals.

Shawn Smallman

Quarantined across borders, a blog

Before entering restaurants in Taiwan people sanitize their hands and have their temperature taken. Image courtesy of Isabella Mori.

Recently my colleague, Dr. Priya Kapoor, shared a blog with me “Media Rise: Quarantined across borders.” Every day, two or three new blog posts are added. What I like about this site is that it focused on the personal experiences of people who have impacted by COVID-19, from a Pakistani study-abroad student in China, to an American facing anti-Asian discrimination. Each piece is quite brief, perhaps just a couple of pages, but they still provide an interesting point of view on our diverse experiences during the pandemic. I particularly recommend Dr. Kapoor’s piece, which speaks to how adults connect with distant parents during a pandemic, and the ties that bind a family.

Shawn Smallman

The 1918 pandemic and COVID-19

Food market in Taiwan. Note the plastic partitions separating customers. Photo taken by Isabella Mori in May 2020.

Like many people, I’ve been struck by the parallels between the current COVID-19 pandemic and the 1918 pandemic.  In 1918 many media outlets in Europe and the United States did not initially give the outbreak adequate coverage, because they were censored during the war, or did not want to reveal their nation’s weaknesses. In the United States and Brazil now, populist leaders are dismissive of the news and data on COVID-19, because it reveals their failures. For this reason, their followers tend to view all COVID-19 information through the lens of partisan politics. Indeed, President Bolsonaro of Brazil has called his followers to storm hospitals to take photos and videos to show whether COVID-19 patients are truly filling hospital beds, as the hospitals and state leaders claim. Such denial has caused painful climbs in COVID-19 deaths in both Brazil and the United States. …

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