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This week’s big controversy concerns the CDC’s deciding to cut recommended days for isolation for people infected with Covid. CDC director Walensky was all over the news explaining that this “was the moment” for a cut, given the whopping number of new Covid cases (over 400,000 on Dec. 28, exceeding the previous record which was in the 300,000’s).

“In the context of the fact that we were going to have so many more cases — many of those would be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic — people would feel well enough to be at work, they would not necessarily tolerate being home, and that they may not comply with being home, this was the moment that we needed to make that decision,” Walensky told CNN.

The CDC had already explained last week that “health care workers’ isolation period could be cut to five days, or even fewer, in the event of severe staffing shortages at U.S. hospitals”.

Then, on Monday, the CDC announced that individuals who test positive for Covid-19 and are asymptomatic need to isolate for only five days, not 10 days, citing increasing evidence that people are most infectious in the initial days after developing symptoms.

What’s really causing alarm among many health experts is that the new policy has no requirement for a negative test result, with a rapid test, before ending isolation. Even if you test positive on day 5, the CDC says, you can go about your business. So long as you’re asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic or your “symptoms are resolving” and you wear a mask. I don’t suppose the new looser guidance would result in any pressure being put on a pilot or other worker to get back to work even with some mild brain fog or coughing that seemed to be resolving.[1] Continue reading →

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Effective yesterday, February 1, it is a violation of federal law not to wear a mask on a public conveyance or in a transit hub, including taxis, trains and commercial trucks (The 11 page mandate is here.)

The “mask wars” are a major source of disagreement and politicizing science during the current pandemic, but my interest here is not of clashes between pro-and anti-mask culture warriors, but the clashing recommendations among science policy officials and scientists wearing their policy hats. A recent Washington Post editorial by Joseph Allen, (director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), declares “Everyone should be wearing N95 masks now”. In his view: Continue reading →

Lung Scans[0]

As much as doctors and hospitals are raising alarms about a shortage of ventilators for Covid-19 patients, some doctors have begun to call for entirely reassessing the standard paradigm for their use–according to a cluster of articles to appear in the last week. “What’s driving this reassessment is a baffling observation about Covid-19: Many patients have blood oxygen levels so low they should be dead. But they’re not gasping for air, their hearts aren’t racing, and their brains show no signs of blinking off from lack of oxygen.”[1] Within that group of patients, some doctors wonder if the standard use of mechanical ventilators does more harm than good.[2] The issue is controversial; I’ll just report what I find in the articles over the past week. Please share ongoing updates in the comments. Continue reading →

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Q. Was it a mistake to quarantine the passengers aboard the Diamond Princess in Japan?

A. The original statement, which is not unreasonable, was that the best thing to do with these people was to keep them safely quarantined in an infection-control manner on the ship. As it turned out, that was very ineffective in preventing spread on the ship. So the quarantine process failed. I mean, I’d like to sugarcoat it and try to be diplomatic about it, but it failed. I mean, there were people getting infected on that ship. So something went awry in the process of quarantining on that ship. I don’t know what it was, but a lot of people got infected on that ship. (Dr. A Fauci, Feb 17, 2020)

This is part of an interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus point person we’ve been seeing so much of lately. Fauci has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since all the way back to 1984! You might find his surprise surprising. Even before getting our recent cram course on coronavirus transmission, tales of cruises being hit with viral outbreaks are familiar enough. The horror stories from passengers on the floating petri dish were well known by this Feb 17 interview. Even if everything had gone as planned, the quarantine was really only for the (approximately 3700) passengers because the 1000 or so crew members still had to run the ship, as well as cook and deliver food to the passenger’s cabins. Moreover, the ventilation systems on cruise ships can’t filter out particles smaller than 5000 or 1000 nanometers.[1] Continue reading →