2021.10.14 England's Pharma-only Mitigation Culture
#12 A virus mutates inside of a host. Which means the COVID-19 virus' slow mutation rate is compensated for by its ability to infect so many.
Introduction: At “Talking COVID” hosted by UC Santa Barbara weeks ago, Dr. Daniel Griffin of Columbia University recalled something interesting from his teens growing up in NYC while HIV was felling his young adult neighbors in shockingly sudden health declines. “They’d get a pharmaceutical to manage it” Griffin said of the HIV virus, “then it would mutate away” from that drug. Researchers would develop another drug, and HIV mutated “escaped” from that too. He didn’t have time to tell us the rest of the HIV story. Side-by-side, SARS-CoV-2 is a more slowly mutating virus than HIV. Except for one thing: the virus causing COVID mutates slowly, “but not if it infects a billion people.” Griffin said the most “selfish” thing the U.S. could do in managing COVID would be to vaccinate the world. That seemed interesting.
An old Latin proverb listed in Lapham’s Quarterly “Epidemics” issue says “Disease is not of the body but of the place”. While Seneca the Younger lacked access to commercial air travel when he said this before his death in 65 AD, his quote rings true right now. As such, this issue of TracingCOVID is peppered with news clips from England 🏴 and the greater UK 🇬🇧.
Contents:
Testing 🧪
Tracing for early detection responses & epidemiology leads ✔️
=>Tracing LongCOVID
Isolating alternatives (Masking, Ventilating, Vaccine Passports) 😷
**FACES**
Infodemic
Beyond the Scope
✨ = Clean story on a complex topic
Testing 🧪
Oct. 9 Free COVID saliva tests, Door Dashed to your home. What’s not to like? (Twin Cities Pioneer-Press) - The free testing program delivers a spit test (no irritating nasal swab) to your homes anywhere in Minnesota, then emails results in a comparable time frame to most other tests.
🇬🇧 Oct. 9 Isolate if you have Covid symptoms but negative PCR, says local health official Advice follows discovery of anomalies in which people had positive lateral flow tests but negative lab results (The Guardian) - "The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which replaced Public Health England at the start of October, said it did not believe there were problems with any testing kits and added that there was no evidence of a new variant."
🇬🇧 Oct. 11 Lateral flow tests: Positive rapid Covid test results followed by negative PCRs causing chaos in schools (iNews UK) - While the UK Health Security Agency has refused to comment on whether a new variant could be responsible for the test anomaly, iNews UK “understands scientists are exploring the theory”. iNews reported on the region’s false negative PCR results earlier in the week.
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