@postmates, @ubereats, @instacart, @uber and @lyft could make a major impact on the pandemic by working with @walgreens, @cvspharmacy, and others to deliver rapid antigen tests to people’s doors. Shocked how difficult it is to get a rapid Ag test delivered in San Francisco.
Biden’s 500 million rapid tests won’t be available until mid January. By that point in time omicron will already have done most of its damage in populated cities and tens of thousands of people will be dead in the US.
It’s been 2 years since the pandemic started, and we still don’t have a centralized and easy way to nationally order rapid tests? Let alone receive them for free?
In some cities, it is easy to order a rapid test. In others, not so much. What resources in San Francisco am I missing for rapid test delivery? And who is working to solve this problem?
Surely this is a joke — there is an entire section on COVID on @postmates when browsing @Walgreens, yet the catalogue doesn’t include rapid tests. Pine-Sol, on the other hand, is readily available. @Postmates_Help
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Eagerly awaiting 2022’s global COVID policy… happy holidays y’all!
Hopefully, this year: 1) rapid tests can be received by every US household free of cost and same-day / next-day 2) we can update vaccines beyond the wildtype, Wuhan sequence 3) “COVID is airborne” is understood globally and accepted by WHO 4) better therapeutics 5) better masks
6) better ventilation and filtration systems in schools and workplaces 7) more global vaccine equity 8) more awareness and emphasis on prevention and treatment of long-COVID / viral-driven ME/CFS 9) more funding for therapeutics outside of monoclonals and Pfizer/Merck
I am concerned about sub-threshold neutralizing antibodies tied to disease enhancing antibodies leading to greater persistence of COVID. Those with long COVID are canaries in the coalmine and we should be directing far more attention to the pathogenesis underlying these cases.
For example, we know omicron is ~40x less potently neutralized by antibodies against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, which we based our vaccines off. So our strategy is a booster to boost levels 25x, breaking past this threshold.
But what happens when those antibodies wane? Where are the studies examining the disease-enhancing thresholds for Group IV and other infection-enhancing antibodies?
There weren't any SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant spike protein structures online, so I simulated it and docked its binding to ACE2, Vir antibodies, and Regeneron antibodies. Considering publishing but done just for fun at the moment. Please cite if you want to publish with this.
This study shows that as antibody levels drop, antibody-dependent enhancement can be a factor in enhanced infectivity of SARS-CoV-2. The authors took convalescent antibodies from recovered COVID patients and studied the role of different Fc receptors in mediating this effect.
These findings are concerning, as they suggest that below certain thresholds of neutralizing antibodies, “off-target” antibodies can enhance infectivity.
I worry that as we give boosters against older strains of COVID, the risk of this occurring clinically may also increase. It shouldn’t be controversial to state this, and this isn’t to suggest that vaccines aren’t necessary for saving lives.
(1/6) Fermi’s Paradox, expressed as the Drake Equation, allows us to estimate the frequency of habitable planets and intelligent, spacefaring life. Each additional event is a fraction that reduces the final probability of life within a given distance in the universe ever lower…
(2/6) How can we think of a Fermi’s Paradox and Drake Equation for Lab Leaks? We can call it the Emergent Pathogen Equation.
L = 1-N = P*G*N*R*C
L = probability of lab leak
N = probability of natural origin
(3/6) P = pathogenic research of relevant viral families in a nearby lab occurred (1 if 100% yes scaling to 0 if 100% no)
G = genetic engineering or selection research adapted for human enhanced infection of a previous virus occurred (1 if 100% yes scaling to 0 if 100% no)
9/11 was the first time we got attacked on our own soil since Pearl Harbor. I remember being in 5th grade and being incredulous when I heard that an airplane hit a building in NYC. Initially it sounded like an accident. I remember we had school get cancelled.
Since then, we engaged in a 20 year war and spent trillions of dollars protecting freedom and democracy. And now, we are seeing that the next wave of terrorism is an invisible, biological threat.
We will look back on 2020-2021 similarly to how we look back on 9/11. We got caught off guard, and many people died. It happened on American soil.