Unfortunately, COVID continues to dominate the news. Here's a round-up of some useful information:
(1) Omicron infection symptoms are a lot more like the common cold than previous variants according to UK data:
“As our latest data shows, omicron symptoms are predominantly cold symptoms, runny nose, headache, sore throat and sneezing, so people should stay at home as it might well be Covid,” Spector said in Zoe’s latest report Thursday.
Fatigue was also mentioned. Not mentioned as much: fever and cough. In the best-case scenario, this means Omicron is more like the coronaviruses that have long circulated without killing 1% of those infected. But it's too soon to know if that's the case, or if the milder symptoms reflect the "immunity wall" built up in populations by vaccination and prior illness. (See also this less hopeful report about Omicron severity from Imperial College London.)
(2) A recent laboratory study sheds some light on the transmissibility of Omicron (through aerosols):
They found that over the first 24 hours, Omicron multiplied about 70 times faster inside respiratory-tract tissue than the Delta variant. When they ran the same experiments with the lung tissue, they found Omicron was actually worse at infecting those cells than either Delta or the original strain of the virus that originated in Wuhan....
[Another research team] found that Omicron’s heavily mutated spike protein outmuscled both Delta and the original coronavirus at attaching to ACE2 — the receptor that the virus uses to enter human cells. “We find Omicron pseudovirus is more infectious than any other variant tested,” they wrote....
While the Hong Kong team analyzed tissue of the bronchi — the big tubes that move air from the nose and mouth into the lungs — the types of cells that Omicron infected, and replicated rapidly inside, are found higher up in the airway as well. “This suggests much increased potential for aerosol generation during breathing,” said Don Milton, an aerobiologist at the University of Maryland, who has studied the physical dynamics of respiratory viruses for decades....
If Omicron’s mysterious evolutionary journey proves to truly have given it a preference for airways over the lungs that could be a really good thing, said Stanley Perlman, a longtime coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa. “If your lungs don’t work, then your heart has to work harder, your kidneys have to work harder; there’s a big difference between pneumonia and an upper respiratory tract infection,” he said.
But that’s all a big if, right now, while we wait for more clinical data that can illuminate what Omicron is really doing inside the bodies of people it infects. “It all hints that this virus could be going in the right way, that it’s slowly turning into a common cold-causing coronavirus, like we’re all hoping for,” said Perlman. “But right now, it’s really just hints.”
One takeaway from all this: in indoor spaces, wearing an N95 or similar quality mask will be necessary.
(3) Stanford University will hold classes online for the first two weeks of the next term, which starts January 3 (the same date the Winter Quarter starts here at Chicago--no announcement yet about plans here, although I'd expect something similar). Stanford is also mandating booster shots, as are many other schools in recent days.
(4) Several universities in Ontario, Canada have also announced they are going online to start January, some planning on that format well into February.
More information on university plans for January welcome in the comments, plus links relevant to the issues noted above.
