New thinking about COVID-19

True, many people still don’t get the bare-minimal facts about the novel coronavirus pandemic or, worse, believe all kinds of myths and nonsense.

Yet, I wrote enough about the basics. And proper information is all over the Internet. So, a lack of clarity need not halt our newest thinking. We need to think even when many people are still in the dark. The following comes to stimulate our brain, but not to replace basic information.

For more details on the issue, click on the hyperlinks in each paragraph.

1. It turns out that healthy pregnant women get in trouble by COVID-19. Some of them and their unborn children in mortal danger. So, now the recommendation is to prioritize them in the vaccination campaign too.

2. Wearing your mask only on your mouth or on your chin is not wearing a mask. It’s not yet clear if people who had the infection and recovered and people who were vaccinated, if they can nevertheless pick up the virus, and (not get really ill from it, but) infect someone else. So, even when immune, for the time being, we need to continue wearing a mask and socially distance not to be a link in the chain of transmission. Let’s all be part of the solution, not of the problem. Meanwhile, everybody should know that just (about to be) being vaccinated does not protect you yet. It takes two jabs and four weeks to be almost completely safe.

3. As long as the epidemic is raging, new virus variants will come up, especially more-contagious, more-crippling, but less-deadly ones. So, and this is a new thought, we must stop the epidemic not only to cut down illness, handicap, and death but also to prevent the ‘birth’ of virus variants.

4. The following I would do to stop civil disobedience that seems the main cause of the third wave in Israel, which may cause 1,000 deaths in January:

A. Extensive daily explanations in the media and on leaflets what COVID-19 does, what health risks you took when you get it. Stress the sometimes very long recovery time, the risks of symptoms not healing for a long time or possibly ever (smell, infertility, amputations, sick heart).

B. Over and over again say: these risks are extremely small but if you had such risks crossing a certain street you would not cross that street. This is such an important missing puzzle piece for so many people.

C. Very high penalties on disobedience. Like taking away driver’s licenses. Blocking someone’s bank account for a couple of months. Cutting the ADSL cable to their house. Lock them up. Terrible things that could help people not to take crazy risks but rather comply.

5. Not all COVID-19 vaccines do the same thing. This may have implications for our preparedness against future virus mutations, as follows.

The newest two vaccine types that we receive in Israel do something very new. They make us immune against the most crucial part of the virus, the spikes. Yet, there are new variants that have a slightly modified spike. Not a big enough change, so far, but it could, one day, bypass that immunity.

But more traditional vaccines (as developed in Russia and China) give less-complete immunity. They also make the vaccinated person develop their anti-bodies which will then attack against all kinds of parts of the virus. Then, a big set of mutations could maybe bypass the immunity in some and not in others. It’s kind of a Russian roulette who’s then still protected.

However, the type we are getting in Israel makes us all more or less immune in the same way. That means that certain virus mutations could have free play in a population of ten million people.

Yet, these novel vaccines protect much better. So, in Israel, we should get rid of the epidemic the fastest but our virologists must be on the lookout for novel major mutations that could take our country by storm again.

6. While most epidemiologists are busy computing how many people got sick, stayed unwell, got better, or died, we also need to begin tallying and estimating the number of deaths that occurred from overcrowded hospitals, collapsing health care in general, and from people scared to seek medical help from fear of getting infected with the coronavirus.